The network is treated differently to other sources. It is accessed through a source which defines the access protocol. Currently the only supported access protocol is TFTP. The tftpboot source uses the currently configured network interface which is set with ifconfig. Chapter 8, Networking describes the configuring and setup of network interfaces in more detail.
The tftpboot source cannot be enumerated, that is a list of files cannot be obtained with the ls command, the filename to be retrieved must be already known. To use the filename provided by the DHCP server the tftpboot source can be used without a file specified.
Example 6.3. Using the tftpboot source
This example shows that the tftpboot source is unable to enumerate the contents of the source, using the tftpboot source with an explicit filename and using the server provided filename when its present and when not set.
>ls -l (tftpboot) -r--r--r-- 0 0 0 -1 (tftpboot) >sum (tftpboot)batty 18014 33 (tftpboot)batty >sum (tftpboot) tftpboot: using bootp filename 'batty' 18014 33 (tftpboot) >sum (tftpboot) tftpboot: using bootp filename '' warning: filename is null, tftp may fail Error loading (tftpboot) :No such file or directory >