Acronym for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol.
Allows hosts on your network to be automatically told the details of your network. This is a good thing because it means that you can easily renumber your network without having to go to every machine and change it's static ip. You can still give machines static ip's with DHCP you simply bind the ip to the MACAddress? of that machine. DHCP can also be used to tell hosts about their gateway and their dns servers.
Under Debian Woody, you install "dhcp-client" for clients, and "dhcp" for the server. If you have interfaces other than eth0 and lo0 (such as wan0 for MetaNet), then by default dhcp will refuse to start. You need to edit /etc/default/dhcp and put INTERFACES="eth0". Unfortunately this isn't documented anywhere sensible like the dhcpd man page or the README.Debian file.
In /etc/dhcpd.conf, the options that take time values are in seconds, although the example file doesn't mention this. It's in the man page though, dhcpd.conf(5)
24 pages link to DHCP:
