Bonded head nodes

Greg Lindahl lindahl at keyresearch.com
Fri Nov 8 13:39:12 PST 2002


> I recently wrote both a TFTP client and server.  I initially did some
> research on what already existed, and was surpised at high ratio of talk
> vs. implementation of multicast TFTP.  "Interoperating with" isn't the
> same as "currently implements".

Don,

Any chance that you could write up a little document about what can be
done to TFTP clients and servers to make them more reliable? A while ago
I found out, the hard way, that the standard Linux server and some random
embedded board's client did not want to work when the server was my laptop
with a (slow) PCMCIA ethernet card. I've also seen that it's easy for
a server to get congested enough that clients give up.

As for multicast TFTP, it's a weird beast -- you have to synchronize
all your nodes (so much for "ripple booting" to minimize the power
surge), and if you have packet loss somewhere, it's usually the case
that everyone gets hurt. Neither of these are optimal things to do.

-- greg





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