caveman wrote:
> Even though my DSL provider is a PPPoE?
>
Yep. Unless you're paying extra for a static IP address, which you would
know about. Like about 3 times as much. You have to specially request it
and pay through the nose.
FWIW, PPPoE is a layer-2 protocol. It's lower-level, closer to the
hardware, than IP. It doesn't know about IP addresses, which are layer-3
(higher in the food chain). The function of DHCP is to acquire a
temporary IP address from a pool of addresses. It's also used to find
out useful things like the default gateway (which direction to send
stuff when your computer doesn't know any better, like almost always),
and DNS addresses, which are the addresses of servers at your ISP that
turn domain names like
www.yahoo.com into numbers like 10.10.234.123.
The reason DHCP is standard for ISPs is that it's so much easier to
administer. That and they can have more customers than IP addresses
since it is statistically unlikely that everyone will be online at the
same time, especially with dial-up accounts.
Rod
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