Setting Up a TFTP Server

Purpose

The purpose of this page is to contain information on how to setup a TFTP server on Linux. This is useful for downloading Linux kernel images to the target board during development.

Using Ubuntu

There are multiple options for TFTP servers in Ubuntu, below are two possibilities atftp and tftpd-hpa.

Using atftp in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

To setup atftp on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, you can follow these steps:

Install atftp Server in Ubuntu

host $ sudo aptitude install atftpd

This will complete the installation

Using atftpd

By default atftpd server starts using inetd so we need to tell atftpd to run as a server directly, not through inetd. Edit /etc/default/atftpd file using the following command

host $ sudo gedit /etc/default/atftpd

Change the following line

USE_INETD=true

to

USE_INETD=false

also change the directory at the end of the file to /tftpboot

save and exit the file

Now you need to run the following command

host $ sudo invoke-rc.d atftpd start

Configuring atftpd

First you need to create a directory where you can place the files

host $ sudo mkdir /tftpboot

host $ sudo chmod -R 777 /tftpboot

host $ sudo chown -R nobody /tftpboot

host $ sudo /etc/init.d/atftpd restart

And  to use again type>> 

      host $ sudo invoke-rc.d atftpd start  and  

       >> start working on ...your tftp files will be in /tftpboot ..

Example : 

sto tftp://(your ip)/your_file 

Using tftpd-hpa in Ubuntu

This was verified in Ubuntu 9.04 but likely applies to other releases as well.

Install tftpd-hpa

Installation is an easy one line command:

host $ sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa

Configure tftpd-hpa for Daemon Operation

Configure the newly installed TFTP to run as a daemon by editing the /etc/default/tftpd-hpa file and replacing RUN_DAEMON="no" with RUN_DAEMON="yes", note that this file also defines where your TFTP server is serving from, the default location is /var/lib/tftpboot but may be changed in this file if desired:

host $ gksudo gedit /etc/default/tftpd-hpa

Start the TFTP service

Now start the newly configured TFTP service with this command:

host $ sudo /etc/init.d/tftpd-hpa start

[Ubuntu 10.04] use

host $ sudo service tftpd-hpa start

Using RedHat Enterprise Linux v4 (RHEL4)

You can check to see if a TFTP server is set up with the following command:

host $ rpm -q tftp-server

You should expect to see output similar to:

tftp-server-0.39-2

NOTE: Your version may be different than the one listed above. This is OK, the version above is just an example.

If it is not setup, you can follow these steps:

1. Download a TFTP server for your Linux host. You can search the internet for "tftp-server". You can find the RPM package for download here
2. Install the TFTP server package
   

   host $ rpm -ivh <tftp-server package name>



3. Confirm that TFTP is installed
   

   host $ /sbin/chkconfig --list | grep tftp



4. Turn on the TFTP server
   

   host $ /sbin/chkconfig tftp on

The default root location for TFTP files is /tftpboot.