On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 11:47:35PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote: > could someone please explain to me (or provide me with a comprehensive > link) the main difference between bootp and dhcp? i know that bootp is > primarily used for diskless clients and xterms, and that dhcp is > commonly used in company networks to ease administration, but > theoretically, i could use bootp instead of dhcp too, right? > theoretically, bootp can handle it all. > > i seem to remember that bootp is inferior though, and that dhcp is > better. why? > > thank you very much! DHCP is an extension of BOOTP ... they use the same port numbers (67 for the server and 68 for the client). As always, the RFCs contain all the gory details. A big advantage of DHCP is "Dynamic Host Addressing" (hence the DH in DHCP). This allows you to assign an address without knowing the MAC address of the client before the fact. With BOOTP, you *must* know the MAC address of the client. With this comes the idea of the dynamic lease; that is, one that "expires" after some amount of time. Since a DHCP server can answer BOOTP requests, I recommend you run a DHCP server (unless memory footprint is the major issue). The config file format for the ISC DHCP server is easy to read and maintain. The opposite is true for most BOOTP servers. Regards, -- Nathan Norman - Staff Engineer | A good plan today is better Micromuse Ltd. | than a perfect plan tomorrow. mailto:nnorman@micromuse.com | -- Patton
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