The normal DHCP exchange works like this:
target: Can I have a DHCP address? Here's my MAC address. server: Sure. I don't really care about your MAC, but I'll catalog the MAC/IP pair anyway so that I can give you the same address later. Here's your address, netmask, and DNS servers. I pulled it from my dynamic address pool.
When I said 'special response', there are a couple of things that the DHCP server can do. It can deliver a static address given the target's MAC address. It can deliver extra information such as the filenames for the kernel and root file system. You don't need to do this, but it is sometimes helpful during a system bring-up.
Cheers.
On Wed, Jun 11, 2003 at 09:20:40PM +0530, Gupta, Kshitij wrote:
hi, but the idea is to get a dynamic ip address, why do we need to change the DHCP server settings to give a special DHCP response to our machine. I have seen this happening with the linux kernel. The kernel also requests for a ip address using DHCP and then uses that ip address. Since an ideal way for a bootup is that I connect my device to the network, get and dynamic ip address and download the kernel from a remote machine.
This might be paranoid but is it possible with u-boot currently...??? regards -kshitij