Totally OK way of doing it. You basically manually implemented the protocol APIPA uses to allocate 169.254 addresses.

In addition to the excellent https://sci-hub.se suggestion…

I can find the paper for free 90% of the time by googling the authors and visiting their personal page on their university’s website.

I occasionally have to download and run old versions in a VM to build poorly supported software.

E.g. step 1 of the build instructions here…

Install the following packages in an ubuntu - 14.04.6 LTS machine

It’s pretty close already. I forget where I cribbed the technique from, but I embed python functions into my scripts very often…

E.g. see here