The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a client/server protocol
designed to provide the four pieces of information for a diskless computer or a computer
that is booted for the first time. DHCP is a successor to BOOTP and is backward compatible
with it. Although BOOTP is considered deprecated, there may be some systems that
may still use BOOTP for host configuration. The part of the discussion in this chapter that
does not deal with the dynamic aspect of DHCP can also be applied to BOOTP.