Having problems with limited broadcast

[Peter Steele]

>We ARE talking about "just a LAN" here, right? Also, these computers
>are "not on the internet?"  They have absolutely no connectivity?
>(Unlikely).

When our boxes are initially deployed, they have no IP addresses
assigned to them. Their ifconfig entry looks like this:

ifconfig_lagg0="laggproto failover laggport nfe0 laggport nfe1"

With this config, no IP is assigned to the lagg0 device, so the only way
to access the boxes is via a serial console. From there we give one
system a static IP, and then proceed to configure our "light DHCP"
service on this box via a web app. After this is done, the remaining
systems start communicating with this box via a broadcast protocol to
obtain their IPs. These will be assigned statically to these boxes, and
from there they can get on with launching their applications (JBOSS,
etc).

And I'll leave it at that. I am quite ready to give this one to Kayven
Riese. He clearly knows a lot more about the subject than I do, and I
apologize for the testiness of my posting (deadline pressures). We are
proceeding with using raw sockets to implement our broadcast based light
DHCP service.