3Com WL-603 manual Appendix a IP Addressing

148APPENDIX A: IP ADDRESSING

Auto-IP Addressing Network devices use automatic IP addressing if they are configured to acquire an address using DHCP but are unable to contact a DHCP server. Automatic IP addressing is a scheme where devices allocate themselves an IP address at random from the industry standard subnet of 169.254.x.x (with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0). If two devices allocate themselves the same address, the conflict is detected and one of the devices allocates itself a new address.

Automatic IP addressing support was introduced by Microsoft in the Windows 98 operating system and is also supported in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.