As far as I can make out when you set up dhcp3 to act as a bootp server you need to put in the hardware address of the box that you are going to provide the info to, and this gets echoed back to the requesting device (see below).
If I am initialising a whole bunch of embedded systems (and I only need to do them a few times, then they are out in the fields and I never re-initialise them), having to put the MAC address in each time is an error prone fiddle. So I would like to set things up so that I have an ethernet card dedicated to servicing such requests and then have the server respond to whatever MAC address gets sent and initiate the TFTP transfer. If I simply say:- subnet 192.168.254.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { range 192.168.254.100 192.168.254.200; filename "vmlinus"; server-name "192.168.254.254"; } the boxes fail saying that the MAC address was not handled. I guess that when dhcpd sends back the response when a specific hardware address is specified it includes the MAC address from the request, but not for a simple subnet. Otherwise I have to put in :- host board { hardware ethernet 0:0c:42:04:02:62; fixed-address 192.168.254.1; filename "vmlinus"; server-name "192.168.254.254"; } and that works. Now you may recognise this MAC address as being a Microtik address, and yes this is a Routerboard I am using. Microtik provide a utility (for Windows) which is a combined DHCPD server and TFTP server, it sees the device and allows the user to select and send a kernel image to the machine. It does not seem to want to work under WINE, and anyway I would rather a native utility. I guess this must have come up before, but probably due to me asking the wrong question, Google has not provided an answer. Any help gratefully received. I realise this is not strictly a Debian problem but I could not think of a better list to ask and I would end up running the solution on a Debian box. Regards David -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]