Chapter 16. BOOTP: Bootstrap Protocol
Introduction
In Chapter 5 we described how a diskless system, with no knowledge of its IP address, can determine its IP address using RARP when it is bootstrapped. There are two problems with RARP: (1) the only thing returned is the IP address, and (2) since RARP uses a link-layer broadcast, RARP requests are not forwarded by routers (necessitating an RARP server on every physical network). This chapter describes an alternative method for a diskless system to bootstrap itself, called the Bootstrap Protocol, or BOOTP.
BOOTP uses UDP and normally works in conjunction with TFTP (Chapter 15). RFC 951 [Croft and Gilmore 1985] is the official specification for BOOTP with clarifications given in RFC 1542 [Wimer 1993 ...
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