When you first open your laptop at the coffee shop, it doesn’t have an IP address. It doesn’t even know what IP address it should have. Or what its name servers are. Or what its subnet mask is.
Of course, you could manually configure it! Just type in the numbers that the cashier hands you with your coffee!
OK, that doesn’t happen. No one would bother. Or they’d use a duplicate address. And things wouldn’t work. And they’d probably rage-drink their coffee and never return.
It would be better if there were a way to automatically configure a computer that just arrived on the network, wouldn’t it?
That’s what the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is for.
The overview:
Client --> [DHCPDISCOVER packet] --> Server
Client <-- [DHCPOFFER packet] <-- Server
Client --> [DHCPREQUEST packet] --> Server
Client <-- [DHCPACK packet] <-- ServerThe details:
When your laptop first tries to connect to the network, it sends a DHCPDISCOVER packet to the broadcast address (255.255.255.255) over UDP to port 67, the DHCP server port.
Recall that the broadcast address only propagates on the LAN–the default gateway does not forward it.
On the LAN is another computer acting as the DHCP server. There’s a process running on it waiting on port 67.
The DHCP server process sees the DISCOVER and decides what to do with it.
The typical use is that the client wants an IP address. We call this leasing an IP from the DHCP server. The DHCP server is tracking which IPs have been allocated and which are free out of its pool.
In response to the DHCPDISCOVER packet, the DHCP server sends a DHCPOFFER response back to the client on port 68.
The offer contains an IP address and potentially a lot of other pieces of information including, but not limited to:
The client can accept or ignore the offer. (Maybe there are multiple DHCP servers making offers, but the client may only accept one of them.)
If the offer is accepted, the client sends a DHCPREQUEST back to the server notifying it that it wants that particular IP address.
Finally, if all’s well, the server replies with an acknowledgment packet, DHCPACK.
At that point, the client has all the information it needs to participate on the network.
Reflect on the advantages of using something like DHCP over manually configuring the devices on your LAN.
What types of information does a DHCP client receive from the DHCP server?