BOOTP Relay Agents (Forwarding Agents)

One reason why RARP was quickly replaced by BOOTP is that RARP required the client being configured and the server providing it with an IP address to be on the same physical network. This is fine when you run a small organization with ten machines, which are probably all on the same physical network. Larger networks must be divided into multiple physical networks for efficiency, however. RARP would require a separate RARP server for each network, meaning needing to duplicate all the functions of a single server onto multiple machines. Worse yet, all the configuration information would also be duplicated, and any changes would need to be made to all the different servers each time.

BOOTP is designed to allow ...

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