Writeable TFTP Server On CentOS

Well this caught me out for an embarassingly long time. There are loads of examples of setting up a TFTP server on the web. The vast majority of them assume that you are using them read-only for PXE booting.

I needed to make it writeable so that it could be used for storing switch/router backups. It is trivially simple once you have read the man page (pro tip: RTFM).

I am doing this on RHEL6, it should be fine on Centos, Scientific Linux or Fedora as is. Any other distro it will require some modification. First install it (install the client as well to test at the end:

yum install tftp tftp-server xinetd
chkconfig xinetd on

Now edit the file `/etc/xinetd.d/tftp to read:

service tftp
{
    socket_type = dgram
    protocol    = udp
    wait        = yes
    user        = root
    server      = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
    server_args = -c -s /var/lib/tftpboot
    disable     = no
    per_source  = 11
    cps         = 100 2
    flags       = IPv4
}

There are 2 changes to this file from the defaults. The disable line enables the service. Normally that is where you leave it. However, you cannot upload to the server in this case without pre-creating the files.

The second change adds a -c flag to the server_args line. This tells the service to create the files as necessary.

It still will not work though. You need to tweak the filesystem permissions and SELinux:

chmod 777 /var/lib/tftpboot
setsebool -P tftp_anon_write 1

Of course you’ll also need to open up the firewall. So add the following line to /etc/sysconfig/iptables:

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp -m udp --dport 69 -j ACCEPT

If your IPtables set up is what comes out of the box, there will be a similar line to allow SSH access (tcp:22), I would add this line just after that one. If you have something more complicated, then you will probably know how to add this one as well anyway.

You should now be able to upload something to the server

echo "stuff" > test
tftp localhost -c put test

Your test file should now be in var/lib/tftpboot.

One final note with regards to VMware. This does not work if you are using the VMXNET3 adapter, so make sure you are using the E1000. GETs will work and the file will be created, but no data will be put on the server. To annoy you even more, the test PUTting to localhost will work, but PUTs from a remote host will not.

It has been noted in the VMware forums here