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AhmedWas
Asked: 2020-09-17 22:59:04 +0800 CST

Is BootP still used?

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I work in a relatively small company that develops and produces switches/routers. Our devices support BootP and DHCP servers/clients. We have a few bugs in the BootP and I'm thinking about suggesting the complete removal of this feature.

I've been dealing with other companies for 10 years now and I've never met a customer that deploys BootP on their devices. Only DHCP. So I think it's not worth the effort to fix BootP and just simply remove this non-used feature.

Question: Is BootP still being used out there? Didn't the DHCP replace it (completely) already?

networking dhcp bootp

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The answer to this question is “absolutely”.

    I work in a large (global, >$5Billion revenue) enterprise that has numerous BOOTP-only devices which give me monthly headaches.

    I'm actively pushing our users to move to DHCP where at all possible. But there are many instruments and other networked devices that manufacturers have simply never bothered to update. DHCP supposes to support "BOOTP IP" assignments (though without the useful data such as lease times).

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