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Ignite-UX Administration Guide: for HP-UX 11i > Appendix B Configuring DHCP Services

Using bootptab as an Alternative to DHCP

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If you want to have more control over the allocation of IP addresses and their mappings to your clients, you can configure entries in /etc/bootptab for each client. Because the Bootstrap Protocol (BOOTP) is a subset of the DHCP protocol, the client's request for a DHCP server will be satisfied with the BOOTP response.

If you also specify a boot file (bf) of /opt/ignite/boot/boot_lif in the bootptab entries, you do not need any additional entries in /etc/opt/ignite/inst_boottab. In this case, you would boot the clients using boot lan instead of boot lan install. Only clients known in /etc/bootptab will be able to boot if you do not use instl_boottab.

A minimal example /etc/bootptab entry follows; you must use your own hostname, IP address, hardware address, and subnet mask. Other networking information may also be specified here or using instl_adm. Specify the Ignite-UX server’s IP address with the instl_adm -t option.

sysname:\   hn:\   vm=rfc1048:\   ht=ether:\   ha=080009352575:\   ip=10.1.51.82:\   sm=255.255.255.0:\   bf=/opt/ignite/boot/boot_lif
NOTE: Important information relevant to using bootptab to enable network installation of clients is found in “Configuring the Ignite-UX Server for Itanium-Based Clients”.

Background Information on DHCP Design

The DHCP protocol is implemented as extensions to the BOOTP protocol, and in fact the HP-UX DHCP server and BOOTP daemons are the same: bootpd. This daemon reads two configuration files: /etc/bootptab and /etc/dhcptab.

The mapping of systems to IP addresses and lease time information is kept in the DHCP database file /etc/dhcpdb. Some amount of management of this database is provided by the dhcptools command.

On the client side, a command called /usr/lbin/dhcpclient is used to contact the server to get an IP address lease. This command has the ability to broadcast out onto the network prior to the network interface being enabled.

The dhcpclient also serves as a daemon process that sleeps until such time that it needs to renew the IP address lease. At that time, the client will recontact the server from which it got the original lease in order to extend it.

The dhcpclient command is not intended to be run by users directly; it is called by other tools during system boot and installation.

For more information regarding the networking parameters that DHCP can supply, see auto_parms(1M) and dhcpdb2conf(1M).

For more general information regarding DHCP, see bootpd(1M) and dhcptools(1M).

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