1 2Common problems and ways to work around them: 3 4Bootpd complains that it "can not get IP addr for HOSTNAME" 5 6 If the entry is a "dummy" (not a real host) used only for 7 reference by other entries, put '.' in front of the name. 8 9 If the entry is for a real client and the IP address for 10 the client can not be found using gethostbyname(), specify 11 the IP address for the client using numeric form. 12 13Bootpd takes a long time to finish parsing the bootptab file: 14 15 Excessive startup time is usually caused by waiting for 16 timeouts on failed DNS lookup operations. If this is the 17 problem, find the client names for which DNS lookup fails 18 and change the bootptab to specify the IP addresses for 19 those clients using numeric form. 20 21 When bootptab entries do not specify an ip address, bootpd 22 attempts to lookup the tagname as a host name to find the 23 IP address. To suppress this default action, either make 24 the entry a "dummy" or specify its IP numeric address. 25 26 If your DNS lookups work but are just slow, consider either 27 running bootpd on the same machine as the DNS server or 28 running a caching DNS server on the host running bootpd. 29 30My huge bootptab file causes startup time to be so long that clients 31give up waiting for a reply. 32 33 Truly huge bootptab files make "inetd" mode impractical. 34 Start bootpd in "standalone" mode when the server boots. 35 36 Another possibility is to run one bootpd on each network 37 segment so each one can have a smaller bootptab. Only one 38 instance of bootpd may run on one server, so you would need 39 to use a different server for each network segment. 40 41My bootp clients are given responses with a boot file name that is 42not a fully specified path. 43 44 Make sure the TFTP directory or home directory tags are set: 45 :td=/tftpboot: (or) 46 :hd=/usr/boot: (for example) 47 48