Setting up the atftpd server on Debian Squeeze

I have recently had some issues trying to use tftpd server in conjunction with some of my Cisco equipment.  I kept getting these errors regardless of actual permissions on the system:

%Error opening tftp://192.168.130.6/c1841-ipbase-mz.124-1c.bin (Permission denied)

So I uninstalled that and installed the atftpd server package.  That seemed to do the trick.  I did have to change the default directory as I did already have a directory full of IOS files that I was just too lazy to move where the maintainers think I should put it.  So here are the steps I took to get things working.

1. Install the atftpd package from the repository.

apt-get install atftpd

2. Add this line into /etc/inetd.conf:

tftp dgram udp4 wait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/in.tftpd --tftpd-timeout 300 --retry-timeout 5 --mcast-port 1758 --mcast-addr 239.239.239.0-255 --mcast-ttl 1 --maxthread 100 --verbose=5 /tftpboot

3. Create /tftpboot directory and change permissions to allow writing to the directory.

mkdir /tftpboot

chmod 777 /tftpboot

4. Restart the inetd server.  To restart the server on Debian run:

/etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd restart

After I followed those steps I was able to connect to the server from my Cisco equipment and transfer files both ways.  

You may want to disable the server when you are not actively using it.  To do this comment out the line you added to /etc/inetd.conf and restart or stop inetd.