bootp discussion

[bs_texas]

I will be interviewing for a job tomorrow and part of the suggested requirements is familiarity with dhcp and bootp. I haven't used bootp yet (that I know of), but I figure I can research it tonight and come up with an understanding.

The thing I found so far is:

"Bootp is a protocol for the automatic network configuration of diskless clients. These days typically it's more modern successor DHCP is being used but there are still many servers and clients in use that only support the classic bootp protocol without the dhcp extensions, so we document it here anyway."

So, just curious about your experiences with it. Is there any magic or special thing to know about? Is it easy or hard to deal with? etc..? I won't know until after the interview for sure, but I think this is a company in a growth mode and they may be adopting linux and deploying it internally and I assume they will be doing installs over their network. The job description is Linux Technician.

Please no google links. I can do that.

Thanks

[je_fro]

sparc has something similar (I think)
off the top of my head, a booting machine calls a server running tftp and downloads and boots a kernel...simple to set up and use. search sparc stuff if you get stuck...they have great documentation.

[The Linux Kid]

From what I've had to do with it (upgrading old switches) its basically the older version of DHCP and for diskless stuff it points the computer to a TFTP server to get a kernel etc. I don't know about linux with it though - i've only used a windows server for it....

[bs_texas]

Thanks for the comments. Yeah, I see that there exists a relationship to TFTP as well as the client machine's MAC address. Since the client doesn't yet have an IP to address on the network, apparently the bootp server starts communicating with the device based on the MAC address. Apparently there are other bootp scenarios outside the basic networking via NICs, but probably this is what I need to focus on.

[bs_texas]

Well crap. I guess I blew it.
Talked to the first guy. He said it's a great company, gave a little history, etc. The next guy didn't interview me, just took me back to a workstation and said there's a problem with this PC. Fix it and mount this NFS share. :eek:

There was no IP, so I tried ifconfig eth0 up. Wrong. I haven't used red hat in a while (that's what they use) so I forgot about 'service network restart'. Then I accidentally mistyped the name of the share. So it didn't mount. I did a quick man nfs, since I haven't done any nfs stuff in a while, and tried to add line to fstab, something like 192.168.1.40:/mas /temp rsize=..... Didn't mount. Typed mats instead of mas. Poof. Thanks for stopping by.
It was no interview really. Next was to talk to his manager. We'll let you know. Let me show you to the door. :( It wasn't a whirlwind. More like a tornado.

Now I'm thinking of Dumb and Dumber where Jim Carrey asks the good looking woman if he has a chance, and she's says one in a million... and he was excited because there still was a chance. :rolleyes: