Quote:
Originally Posted by carbon60
The messages at the top are around the time the internet went down. Could you give me some further insight to what the DHCP messages actually mean?
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When you connect to the internet it isnt like plugging your hose pipe into the tap and you get water. The modem does several things as it establishes it's connection to the cmts such as determining the correct power level it needs etc. Once the physical connection has been established the next thing it needs (along with any device which connects to a network, whether it be internet or lan) is an ip address. Your ip address is the address VM gives your router (and thus all devices in your house) and has be to globally unique. As an example, when you go to youtube.com you will fire off a request to the google dns servers saying "hey, can I have the ip address for youtube.com" and it will reply saying it is 192.168.2.4 (or whatever it is) but that message has to have some way of getting back to you. So VM give youj an ip address which it knows is yours so data across the internet can get back to your router and your router is responsible for ensuring it gets back to the right device on your lan (another story which i wont get in to).
Soooo, dhcp (dynamic host configuration protocol) is basically a way of automatically assigning ip addresses (like giving out street numbers) rather than somebody having to do it all manually. If you setup your own network with 10 devices you could manually configure their ip addresses but for VM they will give the cmts a pool of ip addresses (like 82.174.1.1 - 82.174.255.254) and it will hand out whatever addresses are not in use at the time when you modem trys to connect. DHCP messages are the modem talking to the cmts saying "hey I need an ip address" and the cmts saying "sure, is this one ok".