History
DHCP was first defined as a standards track protocol in RFC 1531 in October 1993, as an extension to the Bootstrap Protocol (BOOTP). The motivation for extending BOOTP was that BOOTP required manual intervention to add configuration information for each client, and did not provide a mechanism for reclaiming disused IP addresses.
Many worked to clarify the protocol as it gained popularity, and in 1997 RFC 2131 was released, and remains as of 2011 the standard for IPv4 networks. DHCPv6 is documented in RFC 3315. RFC 3633 added a DHCPv6 mechanism for prefix delegation. DHCPv6 was further extended to provide configuration information to clients configured using stateless address autoconfiguration in RFC 3736.
The BOOTP protocol itself was first defined in RFC 951 as a replacement for the Reverse Address Resolution Protocol RARP. The primary motivation for replacing RARP with BOOTP was that RARP was a data link layer protocol. This made implementation difficult on many server platforms, and required that a server be present on each individual network link. BOOTP introduced the innovation of a relay agent, which allowed the forwarding of BOOTP packets off the local network using standard IP routing, thus one central BOOTP server could serve hosts on many IP subnets.
Read more about this topic: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“In every election in American history both parties have their clichés. The party that has the clichés that ring true wins.”
—Newt Gingrich (b. 1943)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)