[Techtalk] nat firewall and tftpboot

[Maria McKinley]

Wim De Smet wrote:
> On 2/7/07, Maria McKinley <maria at shadlen.org> wrote:
>> I am having a very hard time getting my diskless servers to boot off the
>> network. It use to work, but unfortunately, a bunch of things have
>> changed, and it was impossible to change things one at a time, so I
>> don't know where the problem lies. (All IPs changed, the firewall
>> changed, the DHCP server changed, and I'm now using NAT, where I wasn't
>> before.) I am looking for a good tutorial or how-to on setting up a
>> tftpboot server, which at least mentions doing this on a network where
>> there is one-to-one NAT. Anyone know of one? I've tried googling, but
>> mostly get stuff for macs and bsd. I'm using debian (although anything
>> based on linux would be helpful).
>>
>> In case someone is an expert:
>>
>> Using ethereal, I see that the client starts to receive the kernel
>> packages, but after a large chunk, the tftp server requests repeatedly
>> to know who has the client's ip, but the client does not appear to
>> answer, and then the client boot fails with the message "Too many 
>> packages"
> 
> In this case, are we talking about the client ip, or the translated
> client ip? i.e. is the server somehow aware of the client IP behind
> the NAT and is it requesting the mac address for the wrong IP?
> 
> greets,
> Wim

Hi Wim,

Everything is done using the local ips, and as far as I can tell using 
NAT should have absolutely no effect; this *should* be all direct 
communication behind the firewall. The network configuration and the 
host files are all using local ips, and the machines are set to use 
their own host files before any dns. The communication I am looking at 
using ethereal is all using the local ips.

thanks,
maria