[asterisk-users] OT - How to organize TFTP root directory ?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:50:29PM +0200, Benny Amorsen wrote:
> Olivier <oza-4h07 at myamail.com> writes:
> 
> > Most (if not all) IP phones support provisioning through DHCP/TFTP.
> > The trouble is some phones seem to require to store their config files in
> > TFTP root directory.
> 
> A lot of IP phones support HTTP instead of TFTP. This helps, because it
> is fairly easy to write a script which dynamically generates the
> configuration.

Right. Using TFTP has the obvious problem of placing all the
configurations of the phones inthe open. Anybody can just go and grab
them.

(Hmmm... I wonder what it would take to do a brute-force scan on the
range of all the MAC addresses used by IP phones)

It is slow and unextendible. HTTP allow you to provide different content
by User-Agent, by Host (name-based virtual hosting), and many other.

Just in case you want to provide dynamic content over TFTP, be sure to
cache it somewhere, as the dumb TFTP client can request any block of
data from the middle of a file.

It's no like a simple HTTP client takes that much ammount of code.
Etherboot (http://etherboot.org/ ) has had an implementation of PXE over
HTTP for quite some time. They were operating under the strict
limitations of 64kB code size limit (and weren't getting anywhere near
that, unless you built it with all the card drivers).

TFTP should just die.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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