TFTP plus plus

For years I’ve used Cisco’s TFTP program, thinking it was the best thing since sliced bread. I had simple TFTP needs, and whenever I’d need it, I’d simply go to Old Version .com and grab it.

Today I happened to looked over my boss’ shoulder while he was configuring one of our wifi switch routers and noticed that he was using TFTPD32.

I downloaded it and was jazzed about seeing the DHCP, TFTP, SNTP and Syslog functionality that it has built in. Simply put, that means that when you reset a unit and it, say, defaults to DHCP mode, you can simply use this little exe program to quickly assign it an address, see the address that’s being assigned, and then rock and roll! Before this, I was doing all sorts of other craziness, such as nmap’ing the DHCP range of a network and then looking through the MAC addresses to find my unit.

You gotta be careful, though. Rumor has it that your computer supports RSTP and if you were, say, on a customer’s WiFi network *and* wired via ethernet some units (as our muni wifi boxes), you could run into problems and create some sort of bridging loop or something. (I have yet to confirm this and am still getting up to speed on RSTP issues in production).

TFTPD32 allows you to tweek tsize, blocksize and timeout, which (in theory) allow you to maximize performance when transferring large amounts of data. Haven’t tried this, but would be very curious if others here had…