Understanding how TFTP Server works

Question

I have an Ubuntu machine which acts as a TFTP Server. I want to configure my Cisco IOS routers to take configuration from this TFTP server at boot time.

I have a few doubts- Where do I store the configuration file for my Cisco router in the TFTP Server? Currently, I have created two temp folders in /var/lib/tftpboot-

automation@automation:/var/lib/tftpboot$ ls -l
total 8
drwx------ 2 tftp tftp 4096 Mar 31 15:37 ExrZHRa-incoming
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 31 15:52 TXJla-outgoing

automation@automation:/var/lib/tftpboot$ tree
.
├── ExrZHRa-incoming [error opening dir]
└── TXJla-outgoing
    └── R1.txt

2 directories, 1 file

As per Cisco's documentation, this is the syntax to get a file from TFTP server-

copy tftp: [[[//location ]/directory ]/filename ] nvram:startup-config 

Example:
Device# copy tftp://server1/dir10/datasource nvram:startup-config

As per my understanding, the location will be IP of my TFTP Server and filename will be the actual config file to be loaded. But what should be configured in the directory? I tried /var/lib/tftpboot/TXJla-outgoing but it didn't work.

Answer 1

Assuming you use something like this configuration guide, the root of the TFTP server is /var/lib/tftpboot/.

If this is the root, and the file is directly in there then your tftp command will look like this:

copy tftp://ip.add.re.ss/FILENAME nvram:startup-config

LIke a web server, the 'root' of the TFTP server's config is the root directory on-disk that your server will serve from; this is omitted in the remote system that's doing the copying.