SOME OF THE MAIN TOPICS IN THIS CHAPTER ARE
You should read this chapter and Chapter 29, "Network Name Resolution," as though they were one, because they cover both sides of the coin when talking about how computers are uniquely identified on a network. This chapter deals with the specifics of how computers can be set up to automatically receive addressing and other information when they boot. This relieves the system administrator from having to manually configure each computer individually every time a global change is made. Chapter 29 discusses how other computers on the network go about determining the particular address of another computer on the network by registering themselves and querying the Domain Name System (DNS) database. BOOTP is an old protocol. DHCP has also been around for awhile. However, DHCP is basically a protocol that builds on and expands the capabilities that BOOTP first provided. For this historical reason, and the fact that BOOTP is still in use in many networks, both are examined in this chapter. Most modern DHCP servers, including Windows 2000 and 2003 servers and the Unix/Linux family of operating systems, still support BOOTP. |