Network Working Group K. Sollins
Request For Comments: 1350 MIT
STD: 33 July 1992
Obsoletes: RFC 783
THE TFTP PROTOCOL (REVISION 2)
Status of this Memo
This RFC specifies an IAB standards track protocol for the Internet
community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
Please refer to the current edition of the "IAB Official Protocol
Standards" for the standardization state and status of this protocol.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Summary
TFTP is a very simple protocol used to transfer files. It is from
this that its name comes, Trivial File Transfer Protocol or TFTP.
Each nonterminal packet is acknowledged separately. This document
describes the protocol and its types of packets. The document also
explains the reasons behind some of the design decisions.
Acknowlegements
The protocol was originally designed by Noel Chiappa, and was
redesigned by him, Bob Baldwin and Dave Clark, with comments from
Steve Szymanski. The current revision of the document includes
modifications stemming from discussions with and suggestions from
Larry Allen, Noel Chiappa, Dave Clark, Geoff Cooper, Mike Greenwald,
Liza Martin, David Reed, Craig Milo Rogers (of USC-ISI), Kathy
Yellick, and the author. The acknowledgement and retransmission
scheme was inspired by TCP, and the error mechanism was suggested by
PARC's EFTP abort message.
The May, 1992 revision to fix the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" protocol
bug [4] and other minor document problems was done by Noel Chiappa.
This research was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency
of the Department of Defense and was monitored by the Office of Naval
Research under contract number N00014-75-C-0661.
1. Purpose
TFTP is a simple protocol to transfer files, and therefore was named
the Trivial File Transfer Protocol or TFTP. It has been implemented
on top of the Internet User Datagram protocol (UDP or Datagram) [2]
Sollins [Page 1]
RFC 1350 TFTP Revision 2 July 1992
