6.2.2.1 Dynamic Configuration

A number of protocol provisions have been made for dynamic configuration.

• ICMP Information Request/Reply messages

  This obsolete message pair was designed to allow a host to find the number of the network it is on. Unfortunately, it was useful only if the host already knew the host number part of its IP address, information that hosts requiring dynamic configuration seldom had.

• Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP) [BOOT:4]

  RARP is a link-layer protocol for a broadcast medium that allows a host to find its IP address given its link layer address. Unfortunately, RARP does not work across IP gateways and therefore requires a RARP server on every network. In addition, RARP does not provide any other configuration information.

• ICMP Address Mask Request/Reply messages

  These ICMP messages allow a host to learn the address mask for a particular network interface.

• BOOTP Protocol [BOOT:2]

  This protocol allows a host to determine the IP addresses of the local host and the boot server, the name of an appropriate boot file, and optionally the address mask and list of default gateways. To locate a BOOTP server, the host broadcasts a BOOTP request using UDP. Ad hoc gateway extensions have been used to transmit the BOOTP broadcast through gateways, and in the future the IP Multicasting facility will provide a standard mechanism for this purpose.

The suggested approach to dynamic configuration is to use the BOOTP protocol with the extensions defined in "BOOTP Vendor Information Extensions" RFC-1084 [BOOT:3]. RFC-1084 defines some important general (not vendor-specific) extensions. In particular, these extensions allow the address mask to be supplied in BOOTP; we RECOMMEND that the address mask be supplied in this manner.

DISCUSSION:

Historically, subnetting was defined long after IP, and so a separate mechanism (ICMP Address Mask messages) was designed to supply the address mask to a host. However, the IP address mask and the corresponding IP address conceptually form a pair, and for operational simplicity they ought to be defined at the same time and by the same mechanism, whether a configuration file or a dynamic mechanism like BOOTP.

Note that BOOTP is not sufficiently general to specify the configurations of all interfaces of a multihomed host. A multihomed host must either use BOOTP separately for each interface, or configure one interface using BOOTP to perform the loading, and perform the complete initialization from a file later.

Application layer configuration information is expected to be obtained from files after loading of the system code.