 | | There are valid reasons for doing this, however. One of them is shown in the in.rarpd command. When a diskless workstation is first turned on, it has no notion of what its network address is. Because it has an Ethernet chip, it has an Ethernet address, but this is not the same as an Internet Protocol address. And it needs to know its Internet Protocol address to talk to its server and begin the boot process. So, it sends out a special Ethernet broadcast packet using the Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP), asking “Hey, does anybody know what my Internet Protocol address is?'' The in.rarpd program, running on a server, receives this packet, looks up the workstation's address in a database (usually the /etc/ethers file), and sends a RARP reply packet back to the workstation saying, “Yes, your address is AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD.'' | |
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