Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!CSLI.STANFORD.EDU!croft From: croft@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: BOOTP Extensions Message-ID: <8810082045.AA18522@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 8 Oct 88 01:15:16 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 16 > From: > > We are examining dynamic address assignment here at Project Athena > too. However, we are not happy with BootP and RARP because they > require advance configuration of the servers. We are designing a new > protocol for complete on-the-fly generation of new addresses along... BOOTP protocol itself doesnt require advance configuration of the servers, it is simply that the original BOOTP server was written this way. As CMU mentioned, it is possible to write a BOOTP server that supports allocation and management of dynamic IP addresses. If you have a distributed server environment, the SERVERS might have a dynamic 'voting' style protocol that they use amongst themselves to divide allocation decisions. But this protocol could be separate from the client-oriented BOOTP, which is kept simple to fit within boot prom situations.