RARP vs inverse ARP

RARP is an older way to assign IP addresses to an end system. It since has been replaced by DHCP.

Inverse ARP is a mechanism used on Frame Relay PVCs to map a remote IP address (on the other side of the cloud) to a local DLCI (on the near side of the cloud).

I thought you use RARP to find the IP address of a device with a known MAC address .....

Yes, that's where I found inverse ARP, while studying Frame Relays ...

Thanks!

I think you mean BOOTP - a simpler static ancestor of DHCP.

Not quiet - a device can only find out it's own IP address using RARP - really from the pre-NVRAM days of diskless workstations, printers and maybe cams or other sensor type devices that only had ROM (and Volatile RAM).

From

RARP (Reverse Address Resolution Protocol) is a protocol by which a physical machine in a local area network can request to learn its IP address from a gateway server's Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) table or cache. A network administrator creates a table in a local area network's gateway router that maps the physical machine (or Media Access Control - MAC address) addresses to corresponding Internet Protocol addresses. When a new machine is set up, its RARP client program requests from the RARP server on the router to be sent its IP address. Assuming that an entry has been set up in the router table, the RARP server will return the IP address to the machine which can store it for future use. RARP is available for Ethernet, Fiber Distributed-Data Interface, and Token Ring LANs.

So there's ARP, Proxy ARP, RARP and Inverse ARP - known them well :-)

Aubrey

Agree - plain vanilla BOOTP was used in between RARP and BP w/DHCP extensions, but it's the latter which is used just about everywhere at this point in time.