Each time you access the Internet through UNI’s network, your computer receives an IP address from the DHCP server that allows it to communicate on the network. Most of the computers on campus share one large pool of IP addresses, which can lead to some problems. Some traffic from each computer, called broadcast traffic, is sent out to all of the other computers in the same pool. When the pools are small, this doesn’t cause any issues, but the larger the pool of IP addresses, the more bandwidth has to be used for this broadcast traffic, and the more time your computer has to spend processing this traffic.
On May 19th, we’ll be cutting the range of the pool of IP addresses in half. There are still enough IPs for everyone to use just the upper part of the current range, but this will allow us to create new pools for buildings in the space we’ve freed up. This means that your computer may have a different IP address handed out to it from the DHCP server after May 19th. It will also have a different subnet mask, the part of the IP that allows a network device to see which pool of addresses it belongs to.