Subject: Naive philosophy question: What distinguishes DHCP from BOOTP?

From: Radia Perlman - Boston Center for Networking <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 20:58:39 -0400 (EDT)

To me, DHCP looks just like another version of BOOTP. I originally
thought DHCP was when the "vendor specific" field got redefined
as a true "options" field with registered options values.
But then someone pointed out the RFC that defined the use of
the vendor specific field for BOOTP, which came out several years
after BOOTP. So my original theory (that you can tell it's DHCP
because of the magic cookie) is wrong, since BOOTP used the same cookie value.

I know DHCP does dynamic leasing of addresses and BOOTP doesn't.

But it's backward compatible with BOOTP.

So how would you answer when a naive person asks "what's the difference
between DCHP and BOOTP?

How can you tell when a packet is DHCP vs BOOTP? Is it just if it contains
options not defined early enough (before BOOTP got renamed DHCP?) Or
is it really a meaningless question, and there's no reason to be able
to tell whether a packet is one or the other?

Thanks,

Radia