bspkumar

 Profile Answers by bspkumar 

• Jul 31st, 2009

 

Some network hosts will not have internal disk to store TCP/IP configuration data such as IP address, gateway.....etc.  BOOTP sends IP addresses and other configuration data to hosts that broadcast BOOTP requests.

Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP) is a network layer protocol used to resolve an IP address from a given hardware address (such as an Ethernet address) and it is now obsoleted by BOOTP and the more modern DHCP, which both support a much greater feature set than RARP.

The primary limitations of RARP are that each MAC must be manually configured on a central server, and that the protocol only conveys an IP address and this leaves configuration of subnetting, gateways, and other information to other protocols or the user.