On Wed, 26 May 2021, Edwin Foo wrote:

>I'm trying to netboot a CATS board from a -current i386 box. dhcpd works
>fine, but when the board tries to tftp the kernel, the connection just times
>out. The funny thing is that the i386 box does respond correctly, but only
>after a long time.
>
>I'm wondering if it's because tftpd is listening/responding on the wrong
>interface - the i386 box's main ethernet card is fxp0, but the CATS board is
>on another network, which the boot server is connected to via de0.
>Unfortunately, there's no flag for tftpd like there is for dhcpd that forces
>it to listen to de0. Am I coming to the wrong conclusion about the cause of
>this? Any help would be appreciated.

Sounds like the problem I encountered a few years ago trying to use
bootp/tftp to configure H-P JetDirect printer interfaces from a multi-homed
server running SunOS 4.x.

In my case, the default route on the server was via an FDDI interface (bf0).
However, the bootp server had plugged the IP address of the first configured
network interface (le0) into the bootp reply.  The JetDirect card then sent
a TFTP request to the le0 address, but got a reply from the bf0 address
which it didn't know what to do with.  AFAIR, it even syslog'ed a message
to that effect!

I got round the problem by hacking bootpd to put the address of the interface
giving access to the default route into the reply packet (rather than the
first interface configured when the server booted).



Roger

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Roger Brooks (Systems Programmer),          |  Email: R.S.Brooks@liv.ac.uk
Computing Services Dept,                    |  Tel:   +44 151 794 4441
The University of Liverpool,                |  Fax:   +44 151 794 4442
PO Box 147, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK           | 
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