RFC 2132 (rfc2132) - Page 2 of 34
DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Extensions
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2132 DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Extensions March 1997
10. Defining new extensions ................................... 31
11. Acknowledgements .......................................... 31
12. References ................................................ 32
13. Security Considerations ................................... 33
14. Authors' Addresses ........................................ 34
1. Introduction
This document specifies options for use with both the Dynamic Host
Configuration Protocol and the Bootstrap Protocol.
The full description of DHCP packet formats may be found in the DHCP
specification document [1], and the full description of BOOTP packet
formats may be found in the BOOTP specification document [3]. This
document defines the format of information in the last field of DHCP
packets ('options') and of BOOTP packets ('vend'). The remainder of
this section defines a generalized use of this area for giving
information useful to a wide class of machines, operating systems and
configurations. Sites with a single DHCP or BOOTP server that is
shared among heterogeneous clients may choose to define other, site-
specific formats for the use of the 'options' field.
Section 2 of this memo describes the formats of DHCP options and
BOOTP vendor extensions. Section 3 describes options defined in
previous documents for use with BOOTP (all may also be used with
DHCP). Sections 4-8 define new options intended for use with both
DHCP and BOOTP. Section 9 defines options used only in DHCP.
References further describing most of the options defined in sections
2-6 can be found in section 12. The use of the options defined in
section 9 is described in the DHCP specification [1].
Information on registering new options is contained in section 10.
This document updates the definition of DHCP/BOOTP options that
appears in RFC 1533. The classing mechanism has been extended to
include vendor classes as described in section 8.4 and 9.13. The new
procedure for defining new DHCP/BOOTP options in described in section
10. Several new options, including NIS+ domain and servers, Mobile
IP home agent, SMTP server, TFTP server and Bootfile server, have
been added. Text giving definitions used throughout the document has
been added in section 1.1. Text emphasizing the need for uniqueness
of client-identifiers has been added to section 9.14.
Alexander & Droms Standards Track