Linux for Network Engineers: Read-Only TFTP with Dnsmasq

In a previous post we talked about dnsmasq’s DNS caching capabilities. Here we’ll talk about the Trivial File Transfer Protocol server included in the dnsmasq utility. Note that this is a read-only TFTP server, and the reason it’s included in dnsmasq is that if you combine it with its DHCP functionality you can set up a PXE server.

Configuration

All the required configuration can be done through the configuration file /etc/dnsmasq.conf. As soon as you install and start the dnsmasq process the DNS caching functionality launches. If you want to disable that and use just the TFTP part of dnsmasq you have to set the port value to 0 as follows in the configuration file:

The TFTP configuration has five options which I am pasting here with the corresponding comments:

Keep reading about TFTP with dnsmasq here...