Enabling TFTP on Mac OS X Lion

While migrating my linux-based server to Mac OS X Lion Server, I noticed it did not have a TFTP server enabled by default. A little googling pointed me to a blog post of The Weezey Geek, who outlined that everything is there, it’s just disabled.

 I enabled the TFTP server as follows (which is slightly different from the post referred to below):

  1. edit /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist as root (sudo vi /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist)
  2. Change


  3.  Next load the configuration with sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist

 Which makes the change permanent and starts the TFTP daemon.

by default TFTPD uses /private/tftpboot as it’s root directory. To change this, modify the following fragment in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist:


To allow TFTP uploads, make sure that the directory to be uploaded to (be wise and make this a subdirectory of your TFTP root directory) is writable to all users.

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