Chapter Summary Continued
RARP serves a different purpose than ARP, but still involves the MAC and IP addresses.
Diskless workstations use RARP to obtain their IP addresses because they do not have a place to store IP configuration information.
A diskless workstation sends an RARP Request packet to an RARP server to determine its IP address. The RARP server has a table of MAC to IP addresses and it sends the appropriate mapping in the RARP Reply.
The workstation uses the IP address to configure its IP settings. Once configured, the workstation can communicate with other hosts on the IP network.