Boot Protocol - technical definition

Facilitates booting devices from a network server rather than from a hard disk by configuring the diskless device with its IP configuration data and the file serverÂ’s name. To download the files it will use to boot from, the booting devices shift to TFTP (the Trivial File Transfer Protocol) or to a file sharing protocol such as NFS. The boot protocol is frequently used for network nodes such as routers and switches not having local storage capabilities.

See Also: Routers; Server; Switch; TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol).