16.7 Summary

16.7 Summary

BOOTP uses UDP and is intended as an alternative to RARP for bootstrapping a diskless system to find its IP address. BOOTP can also return additional information, such as the IP address of a router, the client's subnet mask, and the IP address of a name server.

Since BOOTP is used in the bootstrap process, a diskless system needs the following protocols implemented in read-only memory: BOOTP, TFTP, UDP, IP, and a device driver for the local network.

The implementation of a BOOTP server is easier than an RARP server, since BOOTP requests and replies are in UDP datagrams, not special link-layer frames . A router can also serve as a proxy agent for a real BOOTP server, forwarding client requests to the real server on a different network.