Solaris™ 8 Network Administrator Certification Training Guide

INTRODUCTION

Not very long ago, networks used to be small and static in nature and easy to manage on a per-host basis. Plenty of IP addresses were available, and these IP addresses were assigned statically to all hosts connected to a network. An IP address was reserved for each host in this scheme even if the host was not turned on. This scheme worked fine until networks grew larger and mobile hosts, such as laptops and PDAs, started creeping in. Mobile hosts that moved frequently from one network to another needed special attention, because of the difficulty of reconfiguring a laptop computer whenever it was connected to a different network. With very large networks, the need for centralized configuration management also became an issue.