Coexistance of different tftp versions may be misleading

[Antonio J. de Oliveira]

Hello

Having recently migrated from Fedora FC8 as my main system and a sporadic MSWindows user, I was trying to use the client:

tftp 0.17-16ubuntu1 on intrepid-amd64 2.6.27-11-generic #1 SMP Thu Jan 29 19:28:32 UTC 2009

I was trying to use tftp with command line parameters such as:

tftp -v -m binary 192.168.0.xxx -c put file_name.ext dst

this works flawlessly on a FC8 machine.

It simply does not work, we have to establish an interactive session such as:

connect 192.168.0.xxx
binary
verbose
put file_name.ext dst

I think that for the sake of consistency tftp should work in command-line mode.

Cheers

[Andreas Olsson (andol)]

Assigning package netkit-tftp.

[Andreas Olsson (andol)]

Regarding the command line option, there seems to be some kind of mixup regarding tftp versions. The Ubuntu package tftp contains the netkit tftp. Those CLI options belong with the OpenBSD tftp, which can found in the package tftp-hpa. Feel free to check which of those two tftp versions you have installed on Fedora.

Regarding the "interactive" tftp example you provide; it works fine for me. What kind of file are you trying to transfer? What tftpd do you have on the receiving end?

[Antonio J. de Oliveira (ajoliveira)]

Hello

I tested, it was the netkit I had installed, with hpa command-line works. The binary problem was my mistake, caused by VirtualBox behavior when transferring to a Lantronix device. This bug report resumes to command-line not working on netkit tftp.

Thanks

[Andreas Olsson (andol)]

> This bug report resumes to command-line not working on netkit tftp.

Are you sure about the netkit tftp being supposed to handle CLI options? Based on the man page, this is the only syntax supported: "tftp [host]"

Or did I misunderstand your last statement? Can I close this bug as being invalid?

[Antonio J. de Oliveira (ajoliveira)]

Hello Andreas

You didn't misunderstood my statement. In my point of view it is misleading having two different tftp clients with different behaviour, one working at the command-line level and the other not. This is not just a question of semantics, it may confuse many people. Traditionally and over all platforms tftp has supported command-line, so it is included on shell scripts and batch files. One expects for example to be able to connect to a machine using vncviewer and being able to quickly tftp from there to a remote network device some update.

Why don't they call netkit-tftp a different name so it may co-exist within the same machine with the OpenBSD version? This is the same as you being used to use gEDA, invoke it and suddenly a different pcb package pops up so you are losing precious time searching what happened to the bloody stuff so as to behave differently from what you expected...

Did I made myself clear? Of course you are free to close the bug report or converting it into a functional wish.

Thanks again, always happy to cooperate.

[Antonio J. de Oliveira (ajoliveira)]

I wrote a small article on tftp variations so as to help others if they run into the same situation. It will be the first of a series on my pages:

http://ajoliveira.com/ajoliveira/uk/software/tftp.php

Cheers

[Andreas Olsson (andol)]

Now I believe we are understanding each other :)

While I don't agree on anything being explicitly broken I can easily seem how the current stage of tftp packages can be unclear/confusing. How about if you update the description and summary to reflect that, and I'll mark this bug as confirmed?

[Antonio J. de Oliveira (ajoliveira)]

Done ;-)

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

It is interesting that tftp-hpa is in main and that the tftp package is in universe. However, I'm not certain what would compel someone to choose tftp-hpa over tftp.

13:59:16 - flash:[/tmp] apt-cache search tftp
tftp-hpa - HPA's tftp client
tftp - Trivial file transfer protocol client

[Antonio J. de Oliveira (ajoliveira)]

The ability to do your transfers from the command-line, and integrate those on a script...that's why I use hpa.

[Logan Rosen (logan)]

This bug was fixed in the package netkit-tftp - 0.17-25

---------------
netkit-tftp (0.17-25) unstable; urgency=medium

  * QA upload.
  * Drop tftpd. (Closes: #843906)

 -- Bastian Germann <email address hidden> Wed, 28 Sep 2022 18:08:35 +0200

netkit-tftp (0.17-24) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Orphan package. Set maintainer to QA.

 -- Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta <email address hidden> Sat, 24 Sep 2022 13:35:46 +0200

netkit-tftp (0.17-23.1) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Non-maintainer upload.
  * Make tftp transition to tftp-hpa. (Closes: #1019286)
  * d/copyright: Delete the advertise clause according to Regents' allowance.

 -- Bastian Germann <email address hidden> Thu, 15 Sep 2022 18:30:27 +0200