16.6 Vendor-Specific Information

16.6 Vendor-Specific Information

In Figure 16.2 we showed a 64-byte vendor-specific area. RFC 1533 [Alexander and Droms 1993] defines the format of this area. This area contains optional information for the server to return to the client.

If information is provided, the first 4 bytes of this area are set to the IP address 99.130.83.99. This is called the magic cookie and means there is information in the area.

The rest of this area is a list of items. Each item begins with a 1-byte tag field. Two of the items consist of just the tag field: a tag of 0 is a pad byte (to force following items to preferred byte boundaries), and a tag of 255 marks the end of the items. Any bytes remaining in this area after the first end byte should be set to pad bytes (0).

Other than these two 1-byte items, the remaining items consist of a single length byte, followed by the information. Figure 16.4 shows the format of some of the items in the vendor-specific area.

Figure 16.4. Format of some of the items in the vendor-specific area.
graphics/16fig04.gif

The subnet mask and time value are really fixed-length items because their values always occupy 4 bytes. The time offset is the number of seconds since midnight January 1,1900, UTC.

The gateway item is an example of a variable-length item. The length is always a multiple of 4, and the values are the 32-bit IP addresses of one or more gateways (routers) for the client to use. The first one returned must be the preferred gateway.

There are 14 other items defined in RFC 1533. Probably the most important is the IP address of a DNS name server, with a tag value of 6. Other items return the IP address of a printer server, the IP address of a time server, and so on. Refer to the RFC for all the details.

Returning to our example in Figure 16.3, we never saw an ICMP address mask request (Section 6.3) that would have been broadcast by the client to find its subnet mask. Although it wasn't output by tcpdump, we can probably assume that the client's subnet mask was returned in the vendor-specific area of the BOOTP reply.

The Host Requirements RFC recommends that a system using BOOTP obtain its subnet mask using BOOTP, not ICMP.

The size of the vendor-specific area is limited to 64 bytes. This is a constraint for some applications. A new protocol named DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is built on, but replaces , BOOTP. DHCP extends this area to 312 bytes and is defined in RFC 1541 [Droms 1993].



TCP.IP Illustrated, Volume 1. The Protocols
TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1: The Protocols (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
ISBN: 0201633469
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1993
Pages: 378

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