How does dhcp(d) choose an IP address?

[Timothy Murphy]

I was reading the thread on "Determining IP information for lo"
and it reminded of a strange phenomena I noticed on my system.

The laptop I am using now, which should be 192.168.2.11
(according to /etc/hosts)
has been given the address 192.168.2.101,
although I don't see any mention of this address
anywhere on the desktop running dhcpd,
or on the laptop,
except in /var/lib/dhclient/dhclient-eth0.leases .
(The correct MAC address for the laptop, and its desired IP address,
is given in /etc/dhcpd.conf , but for some reason this is ignored.)

I should say that WiFi works perfectly well with this wrong address.
But it has made me realize that I am very hazy about how dhcp works,
and how exactly dhcpd determines the addresses it will give out.
Is there a reasonably clear account of this anywhere?

I saw incidentally that something or someone
(I assume a yum update)
had moved /etc/dhclient.conf to dhclient.conf.bak ,
just leaving what looked like a fairly useless dhclient.conf.sample ,
confirming my view that the people who write sample files for Fedora
are somewhat lacking in common sense.