A network technician receives a support ticket stating that multiple newly deployed workst… — CompTIA A+ (Core 1 & Core 2)

A network technician receives a support ticket stating that multiple newly deployed workstations in an office branch cannot access local resources or the internet. Upon executing the command line diagnostic tools on one of the affected systems, the technician notes that the client has auto-assigned an IP address of $169.254.42.15$ with a subnet mask of $255.255.0.0$ . Which network host service is most likely offline or failing to provide configuration settings to these client devices?

DHCP serverAnswer
B
DNS server
C
Syslog server
D
Web server

Answer

DHCP server

The DHCP server role is responsible for dynamically assigning network IP configurations to client devices. When workstations receive an address starting with 169.254.x.x, it indicates that APIPA has kicked in because the client was unable to contact a DHCP server.

Step-by-Step Solution

Analyze the observed IP address configuration on the workstation.

The workstation has an IP address of

169.254.42.15

with a subnet mask of

255.255.0.0

Addresses within the

169.254.0.1

169.254.255.254

range belong to the Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA) block.

Identify the cause of APIPA assignment.

APIPA occurs when a client operating system configured for dynamic IP addressing fails to locate or receive a response from an active DHCP server on the local subnet.

Without a valid DHCP lease, the client defaults to APIPA to allow limited link-local communication.

Determine the responsible server role.

The DHCP server role is responsible for automatically distributing IP network configurations.

Restoring or unblocking the DHCP service will allow workstations to acquire valid network IP parameters.

Key Concept

DHCP Server Role and APIPA Behavior

Estimated Time:1m 0s

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