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From: tcp-ip@ucbvax.ARPA
Newsgroups: fa.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: tftp for bootstrap
Message-ID: <8845@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 7-Jul-85 21:50:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8845
Posted: Sun Jul  7 21:50:25 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 8-Jul-85 05:26:27 EDT
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Organization: University of California at Berkeley
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From: sun!l5!gnu@BERKELEY (John Gilmore)

I personally don't see much point in using tftp as a boot protocol
UNLESS it will talk to existing servers.  We might as well use our
existing "nd" protocol if the only thing it will ever talk to is
other Suns.

The responses I've gotten tend strongly toward the "we did it kinda
that way and it has worked for N years" type of stories, which are OK
but not much help.  I guess what I'm looking for is a good reason to
boot with TFTP (nobody has yet said "we did it another way and are
really sorry"), and some help in designing the protocol above TFTP (the
file name, how we find the server), to let it interoperate with other
Internet machines with minimal or no effort.  It seems like the war
stories all describe schemes where a custom boot server exists (maybe
running TFTP but not the way it's spec'd for everybody, eg odd port #,
odd file types).

Can I focus this discussion to answer a specific question?  What does
YOUR system's TFTP server do with a file name in a RRQ which does not have
any pathname delimiters?  Reply to me (sun!gnu@Berkeley.arpa) and I'll
summarize to the list.