A typical host will need to configure at least IP addresses and a recursive DNS server address in order to be used. The major problem of the current stateless autoconfiguration, is that it does not supply a DNS server address. The DNS server address might be a bit more stable, but it’s still a problem to find and configure the correct address. People have suggested various techniques for configuring this, DHCP being but one of them (the others included multicasting and anycasting).

DHCP was assessed as a good solution, since a client might also need other configuration data like domain search path, NTP servers etc. Some have claimed that DHCP is too complex, but a DHCP server in an environment with stateless autoconfiguration does not need to support IP address delegations, and does not need any per-client state. There are also other features that could be omitted in a DHCP server if necessary. Also note that even if the client has an address from stateless autoconfiguration, it might wish to request additional addresses from DHCP, some possible reasons are described in the next section.