[syslinux] MTFTP support in PXElinux??

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Thu Sep 25 11:13:55 PDT 2003


Stephen Brown wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Harry Hoffman wrote:
> 
> 
>>Are there any plans to support MTFTP? The reason I ask is that I would really
>>like to be able to serve tftp via multicast.
>>Does anyone know of any other network bootloaders that use multicast? Do many
>>people see this as a need?
> 
> 
> I'll pipe up and say that we at UMBC are using Norton's Ghost for this
> purpose -- our computer labs consist of rooms full of identical
> machines, and updating the image on one machine at a time would be
> tedious at best.  I can also imagine that with the popularity of Beowulf
> clusters, that a change to the OS would be easier to propagate via
> multicast to all machines at once (I think I have heard some of the
> folks experimenting with clusters mention pxe booting, but I'm not sure
> what tools they use).

Why do you need it for the early network bootstrap, however?

Seriously.

PXELINUX probably will never support MTFTP, for the simple reason that 
PXE doesn't provide sane primitives for doing so (the "just get a file" 
primitive is way too crude.)

The other reason is that both MTFTP and multicast TFTP are fundamentally 
flawed protocols -- they take the problem of insufficient block number 
size and make it fatal.

	-hpa




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