BOOTP clients with DHCP 'pool' functionality....?

[Justin Clark - Integralis UK <[e-mail]>]

We are planning to provide BOOTP clients (those that do not have an
upgrade path to DHCP) with addresses from our DHCP servers pool -
providing we write support for this in our server.

We accept that Lease times cannot be supported and that the BOOTP client
will request an address on every bootup (i.e have no past knowledge of
address allocation).

Only problem is that if the dhcp server does not have any past knowledge
of address allocation then we will quickly run out of addresses because
each reboot requests a new address!

So the plan is to *build* a 'static' table of MAC/IP pairs within our
server based on the first address allocations for each system.....

The idea is that when a bootp client reboots and requests 'another'
address, the dhcp server should browse through it's cache (memory or
from disk) of previously-allocated addresses and realise that the bootp
client needs the address that the server allocated previously.

I have a couple of questions to pose to the group:

1> Any fundamental flaws in this?

2> Can the static/dynamic table be in memory cache or should it be
committed to disk?

4> Are there any commercial or shareware vendors providing such a
capability? i.e a large corporate doesn't need to build a MAC/IP address
pair table for each client - the server dynamically builds the table
based on first allocations?

Kind regards


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Justin Clark
 Product Management
 INTEGRALIS
 Theale, Berkshire, UK
 Tel: [phone]
 Fax: [phone]
 Email: [e-mail]