Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
1.6 Design goals
Up:
Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
Up:
Requests For Comments
Up:
RFC 2131
Up:
1. Introduction
Prev: 1.5 Terminology
Next: 2. Protocol Summary
1.6 Design goals
1.6 Design goals
The following list gives general design goals for DHCP.
- DHCP should be a mechanism rather than a policy. DHCP must
allow local system administrators control over configuration
parameters where desired; e.g., local system administrators
should be able to enforce local policies concerning allocation
and access to local resources where desired.
- Clients should require no manual configuration. Each client
should be able to discover appropriate local configuration
parameters without user intervention and incorporate those
parameters into its own configuration.
- Networks should require no manual configuration for individual
clients. Under normal circumstances, the network manager
should not have to enter any per-client configuration
parameters.
- DHCP should not require a server on each subnet. To allow for
scale and economy, DHCP must work across routers or through the
intervention of BOOTP relay agents.
- A DHCP client must be prepared to receive multiple responses
to a request for configuration parameters. Some installations
may include multiple, overlapping DHCP servers to enhance
reliability and increase performance.
- DHCP must coexist with statically configured, non-participating
hosts and with existing network protocol implementations.
- DHCP must interoperate with the BOOTP relay agent behavior as
described by RFC 951 and by RFC 1542 [21].
- DHCP must provide service to existing BOOTP clients.
The following list gives design goals specific to the transmission of
the network layer parameters. DHCP must:
- Guarantee that any specific network address will not be in
use by more than one DHCP client at a time,
- Retain DHCP client configuration across DHCP client reboot. A
DHCP client should, whenever possible, be assigned the same
configuration parameters (e.g., network address) in response
to each request,
- Retain DHCP client configuration across server reboots, and,
whenever possible, a DHCP client should be assigned the same
configuration parameters despite restarts of the DHCP mechanism,
- Allow automated assignment of configuration parameters to new
clients to avoid hand configuration for new clients,
- Support fixed or permanent allocation of configuration
parameters to specific clients.
Next: 2. Protocol Summary
Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
1.6 Design goals