IP Setup 8-85DDDDHHHHCCCCPPPP RRRReeeellllaaaayyyy AAAAggggeeeennnnttttThe Netopia 4553 offers DHCP Relay Agent functionality, as defined in RFC1542. A DHCP relay agent is acomputer system or a router that is configured to forward DHCP requests from clients on the LAN to a remoteDHCP server, and to pass the replies back to the requesting client systems.When a DHCP client starts up, it has no IP address, nor does it know the IP address of a DHCP server.Therefore, it uses an IP broadcast to communicate with one or more DHCP servers. These broadcasts arenormally limited to the network segment on which the client is located, and do not pass through routers such asthe Netopia Router. If the Netopia Router is configured to act as a DHCP server, it will assign the client anaddress from an address pool configured locally in the Netopia Router and respond to the client's requestitself.However, if the Netopia Router is configured to act as a DHCP relay agent, it does not satisfy the DHCP requestitself, but instead forwards the request to one or more remote DHCP servers. These servers process therequest, assign an address from an address pool configured on the remote server, and forward the responseback to the Netopia Router for delivery back to the client. The agent then sends the response to the client onbehalf of the DHCP server. This process is transparent to the client, which doesn't know that it iscommunicating through an intermediary rather than directly to a local server. Using DHCP relay, it is possible tocentralize the configuration information for the host computers at many remote sites at a single location, easingthe burden of administering configuration management for remote sites.To configure the Netopia Router to act as a DHCP relay agent, from the Main Menu navigate to the SystemConfiguration menu.MainMenuSystemConfigurationIP AddressServing
