Patent ID: 8259597

Claim:
A gaming network for managing internet protocol (IP) addresses, the gaming network comprising: one or more gaming machines, wherein each gaming machine includes one or more gaming presentations that are displayable to a user and each gaming machine is assigned an external IP address, and wherein at least one gaming machine of the one or more gaming machines further includes more than one in-game network devices that are IP address-capable and an in-game switch that manages an internal IP address scope for the more than one in-game network devices; a local server, wherein the local server provides the internal IP address scope to the in-game switch; a communication link, wherein the communication link connects the one or more gaming machines and the local server; and wherein the in-game switch determines whether an updated internal IP address scope has been received from the local server, and wherein the in-game switch determines whether an updated external IP address has been received from a remote server; wherein, in response to the in-game switch having determined that no updated internal IP address scope and updated external IP address were received, the in-game switch leases a temporary internal IP address selected from a default IP address scope to each of the more than one in-game network devices; wherein the in-game switch is configured to avoid overloading the local server with service discovery requests after a power outage by the leasing of the temporary internal IP addresses to the more than one in-game network devices, in response to the in-game switch having determined that no updated internal IP address scope and updated external IP address were received.