Zero Configuration Networking with Linux

The network interface on your computer needs a network address in order to communicate with other computers. Zeroconf uses the Internet Protocol (IP), so it needs to assign an IP address as the network address. A Zeroconf-enabled computer will not usually assign an IP address automatically if one already exists for that computer. However, if no IP address is configured, a link-local IP address is automatically allocated from within the IP address range prefixed by 169.254. Two Linux programs for achieving this result are zeroconf and zcip.