rarpd - Man Page

rarpd [-aAvde] [-b bootdir ] [ interface ]

Rarpd is a daemon which responds to RARP requests. RARP is used by some machines at boot time to discover their IP address. They provide their Ethernet address and rarpd responds with their IP address if it finds it in the ethers database (either /etc/ethers file or NIS+ lookup) and using DNS lookup if ethers database contains a hostname and not an IP address. By default rarpd also checks if a bootable image with a name starting with the IP address in hexadecimal uppercase letters is present in the TFTP boot directory (usually /tftpboot ) before it decides to respond to the RARP request.

-a

Do not bind to the interface.

-A

Respond to ARP as well as RARP requests.

-v

Tell the user what is going on by being verbose.

-d

Debugging mode. Do not detach from the tty.

-e

Skip the check for bootable image in the TFTP boot directory. If not present, then even if the Ethernet address is present in the ethers database but the bootable image for the resolved IP does not exist, rarpd will not respond to the request.

-b bootdir

Use bootdir instead of the default /tftpboot as the TFTP boot directory for bootable image checks.

This rarpd obsoletes kernel rarp daemon present in Linux kernels up to 2.2 which was controlled by the rarp(8) command.

/etc/ethers,
/etc/nsswitch.conf,
/tftpboot

ethers(5)

Alexey Kuznetsov, <kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru>
Jakub Jelinek, <jakub@redhat.com>