tftpd-hpa refuses to start if ipv6 is disabled

[Shawn Heisey]

I routinely disable ipv6 on my servers because I am not using ipv6 at all and in the past I have had systems behave strangely with it enabled. With modern software that may not be required any more, but if I disable it, that's one less thing I need to be concerned about with troubleshooting.

My main server had not yet had ipv6 disabled until very recently, which was an oversight on my part. The tftp server, tftpd-hpa, stopped working. I didn't notice this right away, as the main purpose of the tftp server is to do uploads and downloads of files to/from my Cisco networking gear, and I do not touch those very often.

After a lot of headscratching, I finally saw in the log that it was failing to bind to ipv6. Nothing new there, lots of programs complain about that. This is the only Linux software I have used where a lack of ipv6 causes it to not run.

Adding --ipv4 to the options in /etc/default/tftpd-hpa fixed the issue and allowed it to start.

I think that the program should have started with whatever functionality was available. Logging that it couldn't bind to ipv6 is great, but it shouldn't keep the program from running. Bug #1342580 is something similar.

[Shawn Heisey (elyograg)]

Filing this report with ubuntu-bug didn't work, but I did have it save its output. File attachments in launchpad aren't working either, so I put the file on my webserver.

[Lena Voytek (lvoytek)]

Hello,

Thank you for the bug report. Since this request would change the functionality of tftp-hpa, it would probably be best to have this handled upstream. In this case that would be Debian. Would you be able to send a bug report to them (https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting) to move this forward. If the change is added there it will automatically be added to future releases of Ubuntu.

Thanks