> No, it's not an ethernet protocol. It's a layer-3 address assignment protocol that runs inside of IP, which is normally encapsulated in ethernet frames. You c

> No, it's not an ethernet protocol. It's a layer-3 address assignment protocol that runs inside of IP, which is normally encapsulated in ethernet frames. You can have a remote DHCP server running any arbitrary L2 non-ethernet protocol and if it receives a relayed DHCP request it will reply with IP unicast perfectly fine with no ethernet involved. This reminds me fondly of "frottle". A project from the Perth WAFreeNet - a city-wide wireless network back in the early 2000s. The "hidden node" problem with WiFi over these long distances is that each node cannot listen to prevent themselves talking over other nodes (CSMA/CD) -- because they cannot hear the other nodes - only the central access point. There were costly commercial solutions (these days there are not so costly ones, for example many UBNT Ubiquiti products implement 'AirMax') so instead they implemented the Frottle project which would hold and then later transmit packets using a user-space iptables QUEUE driver when it received it's "token" / turn from the central AP over a TCP connection. The quote isn't on the webpage anymore it seems but it was something about a layer 3 & 4 solution to a layer-2 problem - a great and free hack that worked well :) http://frottle.sourceforge.net/ http://frottle.sourceforge.net/