Dynamic IP conflict

[Unoscout]

Hello, I have done abit of research but can't find anything,
I'm curious as to how a global IP address is decided on. IE you restart your router and get a new IP address, how does it "know" that you will get a unique one from everyone else in the world?

Thanks.

[z1p]

All public IP addresses are owned by someone. Eventually it will come down to your ISP owning a chunk of IP addresses that they let their customers use.

If the ISP gives someone a static IP address only that person/computer can use that IP address. Even if that computer is not online.

For dynamic IPs, the ISP runs a DHCP server. Its job is to manage the IP address and lease them to customer's computers. This way ISP can share a set of IPs among various customer computers even if there are more customer computers than IP address (as long all the computers are not online at the same time).

Their is no IP conflicts because the DHCP server assigns all the IPs so it knows which are used and which aren't.