I think the author did a great job of explaining why DHCP feels like a gross hack, because it crosses that boundary. You say > No, it's not an ethernet protoc

I think the author did a great job of explaining why DHCP feels like a gross hack, because it crosses that boundary. You say > No, it's not an ethernet protocol I mean, obviously it's not, by definition, but let me ask -- why does it have a hardware address in the protocol? Is it maybe because this protocol, like ARP, is a bridge between the layers, and thus this protocol shares more in common with ARP than with IP? RARP did not allow a lot of the things that DHCP did, but DHCP can be done in an address-aware mode as well (and BOOTP was much more bare-bones than DHCP, and that's closer to contemporaneous with RARP. All you have with BOOTP is the ability to cross broadcast domains, which are themselves a fiction anyway, as the author points out). If we let RARP do the IP assignment, then DHCP can be used to transmit configuration information to the newly assigned host very easily, and it would allow us to cut out the hardware-addressing aspect of DHCP.