in.rarpd starts a daemon that responds to Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP) requests. The daemon forks a copy of itself that runs in background. It must be run as root.

RARP is used by machines at boot time to discover their Internet Protocol (IP) address. The booting machine provides its Ethernet address in a RARP request message. Using the ethers and hosts databases, in.rarpd maps this Ethernet address into the corresponding IP address which it returns to the booting machine in an RARP reply message. The booting machine must be listed in both databases for in.rarpd to locate its IP address. in.rarpd issues no reply when it fails to locate an IP address.

in.rarpd uses the STREAMS-based Data Link Provider Interface (DLPI) message set to communicate directly with the datalink device driver.

The following options are supported:

-a

Get the list of available network interfaces from IP using the SIOCGIFADDR ioctl and start a RARP daemon process on each interface returned.

-d

Print assorted debugging messages while executing.

/etc/ethers

File or other source, as specified by nsswitch.conf(4).

/etc/hosts

File or other source, as specified by nsswitch.conf(4).

/tftpboot

/dev/ip

/dev/arp

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

boot(1M), ifconfig(1M), ethers(4), hosts(4), netconfig(4), nsswitch.conf(4),attributes (5), dlpi(7P)

Finlayson, R., Mann, T., Mogul, J., and Theimer, M., RFC 903, A Reverse Address Resolution Protocol, Network Information Center, SRI International, June 1984.