Patent ID: 8341392

Claim:
A system comprising: at least one local system bus; modular elements, each modular element being removably coupled with the at least one local system bus; a network device operationally coupled with the at least one local system bus; a device driver that operates the network device and supports booting to a remote boot device; a network driver that communicates with the network device through the device driver, presents itself to an operating system as a network device driver that operates the network device, and supports general purpose network traffic, the network device including first and second hardware addresses assignable to the device driver and the network driver respectively; a local area network; and a dynamic host configuration protocol server including first and second scopes, the first scope comprising a single network address keyed to the first hardware address of the network device, and the second scope comprising a range of network addresses keyed to exclude the first hardware address of the network device.