[asterisk-users] Cisco 7940 phone and tftpd provisioning - for ever?

A J Stiles asterisk_list at earthshod.co.uk
Mon May 9 11:14:04 CDT 2011


On Monday 09 May 2011, Cassius Smith wrote:
> On 5/9/11 6:02 AM, "Doug Lytle" <support at drdos.info> wrote:
> >Sebastian Arcus wrote:
> >> Cisco phones (at least the 7940) are supposed to be run with a tftp
> >> server available at all time
> >
> >That is my experience.  But, if you're running tftp under Linux, then
> >it's probably spawned by xinetd and won't be running unless the service
> >is requested.
>
> If you want the users to have access to ringtones and desktop images, they
> are dynamically loaded via tftp. So yes, you'll need to keep the tftp
> server running.

As far as I understand it, inetd / xinetd is just a wrapper which does some of 
the business of every server daemon:  whenever a request comes in on a 
listened-to port, x?inetd invokes an instance of some external program, with 
its STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR already connected transparently to the socket.  
So the "server" program is spared from having to care about protocols, 
sockets and forking, at the expense that the superserver daemon may take ever 
so slightly longer to do what it has to do on account of having to look stuff 
up in its config.  (Of course, if the external server is written in an 
interpreted language with poor support for sockets, using inetd / xinetd 
might work out just fractionally faster.)

But, surely, the only way to find out if a server is listening on a port is to 
send it a request?  And whether the server is monolithic with its own code to 
deal with incoming connections or started via inetd, it will still equally 
respond to that request.


-- 
AJS

Answers come *after* questions.



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