Hi, just came back to Linode and configured an ubuntu 12.04 server. I've noticed in syslog the following:
Aug 29 05:00:07 yatla dhclient: DHCPREQUEST of 'myip' on eth0 to 72.14.180.142 port 67
Aug 29 05:00:07 yatla dhclient: DHCPACK of 'myip' from 72.14.180.142
Aug 29 05:00:07 yatla dhclient: bound to 'myip' -- renewal in 35270 seconds.

Does this mean that someone has linked into my server via DHCP?

I noticed in the linode guidelines that linodes by default use DHCP to get their IPs and this can be changed to static by specifying in /etc/network/interfaces for ubuntu. Does this mean that the linodes also serve IPs by DHCP? Why aren't they setup for static by default?

No, those are logs from when your Linode (specifically the DHCP client program dhclient running on your Linode) requests an address from the network DHCP server to be used by your Linode.

As to why they aren't static, I expect it's mostly simplicity. This way the standard distributions that you can install will all just work out of the box without requiring any manual configuration. Otherwise you'd need to make changes to your local installation after each new Linode is created before you could get to it on the network (aside from Lish).

But as you note, you can certainly change it to a static configuration if you prefer. There's not much advantage to that in most cases, and in particular it can complicate things a little if you clone images or restore backups to other Linodes.

-- David

Ok, Thanks. Now that I read the log info again, I see that my linode is making a DHCP request to another server (and not vice versa as was my concern)