What is RARP?

In this tutorial, we are going to see What is RARP? The RARP protocol (Reverse Address Resolution Protocol) is much less used, it means Reverse ARP Protocol, it is a kind of reverse directory of logical and physical addresses.
 

 
 
In fact, the RARP protocol is mainly used for workstations without a hard disk and wishing to know their physical address…

The RARP protocol allows a station to know its IP address from a table of correspondence between MAC address (physical address) and IP addresses hosted by a gateway located on the same local network (LAN).

To do this, the administrator must configure the gateway (router) with the MAC/IP address mapping table. Indeed, unlike ARP Protocol this protocol is static. It is therefore necessary that the mapping table is always up to date to allow the connection of new network cards.

RARP has many limitations. It requires a lot of time for the administration to maintain large tables in the servers. This is even more important when the network is large. This raises the problem of the human resources needed to maintain the correspondence tables and the capacities of the hardware hosting the server part of the RARP protocol. Indeed, RARP allows several servers to respond to requests, although it does not provide mechanisms to ensure that all servers are able to respond, or even that they respond in an identical manner. Thus, in this type of architecture, one cannot trust a RARP server to know whether a MAC address can be linked to an IP address because other ARP servers may have a different response. Another limitation of RARP is that a server can only serve one LAN.

To overcome the first two administration problems, the RARP protocol can be replaced by the DRARP protocol, which is a dynamic version. Another approach is to use a DHCP server, which allows dynamic address resolution. Moreover, DHCP is compatible with the BOOTP protocol. Like BOOTP, it is routable, which allows it to serve several LANs. It only works with IP.
 

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