Situation of tftpd-hpa

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 9:05 AM, Stéphane Graber <stgraber at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Recently, tftpd-hpa got synced with Debian. We used to carry the 0.x
> serie in the past and since Lucid we now have 5.x.
>
>  tftpd-hpa |     0.49-1 |        karmic | amd64, i386
>  tftpd-hpa |     5.0-11 |         lucid | amd64, i386
>
> That sync made quite a lot of changes in the way tftpd-hpa behaves:
>  - Instead of using /var/lib/tftpboot, it now uses /srv/tftp
>  - The path is prompted with a priority HIGH debconf question
>  - Instead of using inetd by default, it now runs as a daemon.
>
> All these changes affect LTSP quite a lot as we are quite used to having
> everything handled by inetd (openbsd-inetd) and have our scripts write
> in /var/lib/tftpboot/ and not /srv/tftp.
> That priority high question also means that anyone installing LTSP at
> the moment has to confirm or change the TFTP path.
>
> https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ltsp/+bug/518815
>
> I'm not sure I understand why all the changed in Debian, especially as
> it's very likely to break a lot of scripts and confuse a lot of users.
>
> I would be interested to hear if someone has a good reason to want that
> quite important change happen in Lucid with all the work potentially
> involved to update LTSP and other scripts using tftpd-hpa or if we
> should rather restore the previous behavior and wait for Lucid+1 to
> change it.
>
> As far as LTSP is concerned, I guess I can quite easily fix the issue by:
>  - Updating ltsp.seed to preseed that debconf question
>  - Update the code to use /srv/tftp
>  - Make sure we don't update the inetd record

Hi Stephane-

I also use tftpd-hpa to serve netboot images for many UEC
installations while developing and testing.

I lost about a half-day last week as I upgraded my tftp/pxe server
from Karmic to Lucid, and tftpd-hpa completely broke my setup.  I was
broken by both the /srv/tftp change, as well as the inetd record
change.

In my opinion, we should leave /var/lib/tftpboot as the default source
path, and that debconf question should be medium.  And a bit more work
needs to be done on the init/startup process, allowing for one of
/etc/init.d startup, upstart startup, or inetd startup.

:-Dustin