I used to be a big fan of static ip, right up to the point where I moved down here. In Minnesota (where they use DHCP), if you wanted to hook up a solaris box to the network, you simply plugged in your ethernet cable to the wall jack and voila! You were assigned a hostname and IP address - start working.
Here, however, they're using static IP addresses with NIS+. This means that I have to request a login/password to get onto the network - a 5 minute process that they say could take up to 2 weeks!. Total bullshit.
It also means (apparently) that I'll actually be logging into some sort of centralized filesystem - in other words, I won't actually be using the local hard drive. I don't know enough about it so perhaps I have things wrong conceptually. Anyway, this sounds like how things were set up when I was in the military, back when I was a newbie both to programming and *nix. It was fine then, but this is now, and I'll want to be able to install my own stuff.
We'll see how things work out.
-Dom
