Illustrated TCP/IP by Matthew G. Naugle Wiley Computer Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 0471196568   Pub Date: 11/01/98

Part Six
BOOTP, DHCP, RSVP, and SNMP

Chapter 305
Boot Protocol (BOOTP)

This protocol has been around a long time. It was most often used with diskless workstations. It enabled these workstations to get their configuration and boot files to remotely boot over the network. The best example of this was SUN workstations and their Network File System (NFS). These diskless network stations could boot over the network (using a small bootstrap protocol found in a PROM). With this they could get their configuration parameters such as their IP address and subnet mask and then perform the boot sequence to boot up their machine from a remote server.

The Bootstrap Protocol (BOOTP) is a UDP/IP-based client-server application originally promoted to allow diskless clients to boot remotely from a server on the same network or from a server on a different network for the purpose of obtaining the name of a file to be loaded into memory and executed, an IP address, and the address of its boot server. The RFC for BOOTP is RFC 951, but there have been a few supplemental RFCs since then to clear up some “loosely defined” features of the protocol that can lead to misinterpretation and eventually incompatibilities between vendors supporting the protocol. The most recent one is RFC 1542, “Clarifications and Extensions for the Bootstrap Protocol.” Other configuration information such as the local subnet mask, the local time offset, the addresses of default routers, and the addresses of various Internet servers can also be communicated to a host using BOOTP.