What is Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA)?
Windows 98, 98 SE, Me, and 2000 have an Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA) feature that will automatically assign an Internet Protocol address to a computer on which it installed. This occurs when the TCP/IP protocol is installed, set to obtain it’s IP address automatically from a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol server, and when there is no DHCP server present or the DHCP server is not available.After the network adapter has been assigned an automatic IP address, a computer can communicate with any other computers on the local network that are also configured by APIPA or have static IP address manually set to the 169.254.x.y (where x.y is the client’s unique identifier) address range with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0.