It does use DHCP to attempt to gain it's own IP address. If that fails it falls back and chooses a random IP address in the range that you spotted (this process is part of the standard uPNP spec I believe).

If you can't get your Receiver to get it's IP address via DHCP at the moment then you can get up and running in the meantime by assigning the network adapter on your server an extra IP address in the 169.254.x.x range. So add an IP address of 169.254.0.1 with a network mask of 255.255.0.0 to the adapter on the server.

The details of what it does over the network during boot can be found at http://www.mock.com/receiver/server/ in the "Network snooping" section.