| Title: | DIGITAL UNIX (FORMERLY KNOWN AS DEC OSF/1) |
| Notice: | Welcome to the Digital UNIX Conference |
| Moderator: | SMURF::DENHAM |
| Created: | Thu Mar 16 1995 |
| Last Modified: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 10068 |
| Total number of notes: | 35879 |
I have an Alpha running Digital Unix 3.2C. I am using this workstation as a bootp server for a private LAN. There are two ethernet cards in the Alpha, but gated and routed are NOT running. The problem I have is that the Digital UNIX host sends its own IP address as the gateway address in the bootp reply - even though it is NOT a gateway. I have not specified the `gw=' field in /etc/bootptab. Since this host is not capable of routing, and I have not specified a default gateway to use, I would expect that this field would be set to 0.0.0.0 (no default gateway) in the bootp reply.
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9921.1 | a couple of things... | NNTPD::"[email protected]" | Farrell Woods | Thu May 22 1997 18:28 | 30 |
Don't confuse the "giaddr" field of the boot reply with the "gateway" option. They're quite different! Also, giaddr is always part of the boot request/reply packet. The gateway field is a (rfc-1048) vendor option. Unless you have a :gw= tag in your bootptab, it won't get sent by bootpd. The "giaddr" field is used by a gizmo called a "bootp relay agent". What this does is to propogate boot requests and replies between bootp clients and servers which are not on the same subnet. When a bootp relay agent receives a boot request, it fills in giaddr with the IP address of the interface on which it received the request. The bootp server on the remote subnet sends the reply back to this address, and the relay agent propogates the reply back to the client. Note that a bootp relay agent may be the same machine/device as an IP router. But it doesn't have to be. Moreover, a bootp client "must not" interpret giaddr as the address of an IP router. The client "should" in fact ignore the contents of giaddr in the boot reply message. (References: RFC-951, RFC-1048, and RFC-1542.) In .0 you give a diagnosis without stating what the symptoms are. If you instead start with the symptoms then I'd be in a better position to recommend a potential fix. -- Farrell [Posted by WWW Notes gateway] | |||||
| 9921.2 | Problem appears to be on the client | IROCZ::DUBE | Fri May 23 1997 11:19 | 5 | |
Thanks for the reply. Based on what you have told me (and RFC1542), it appears that the bootp client is misbehaving (using the giaddr field as a `default gateway'). The developer of the client code will fix it. | |||||