DHCP and BOOTP Interoperability
I've talked extensively about how DHCP was designed based on BOOTP and how they use the same basic communication method and message format. This was done for several reasons, one of the most important of which was ensuring interoperability of the two protocols. Given this, you might expect that we could simply say that BOOTP and DHCP are compatible with each other, and that's that.
It is true that DHCP was intended to be compatible with BOOTP. RFC 2131 lists the following as one of DHCP's design goals: "DHCP must provide service to existing BOOTP clients." This seems pretty clear. The reuse of the BOOTP message format is one of the keys to DHCP and BOOTP compatibility. DHCP functionality is implemented not through ...
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