[dhcwg] draft-raj-dhc-tftp-addr-option-02

Hello,

I looked over the RFC 3942 status report and the above option.  I'm a
bit surprised by the following statement:

>    Small devices, such as IP phones, have a need for downloading their
>    configuration from a TFTP server on the network.  There are commonly
>    accepted methods to discover this server via DHCP; the "sname" field
>    in the DHCP header [2] , the "TFTP Server name" option (#66) [3] .
>    Both of these sources of information, however, contain the TFTP
>    server's hostname.  That hostname must then be translated to an IP
>    address.  The usual method to accomplish this would be DNS. [4] This
>    means the firmware in a small "network appliance" device would need
>    to implement the DNS protocol in order to perform this translation.
>    This unacceptably increases the firmware code size.

In my experience, this is most commonly discovered via the "siaddr"
field in the DHCP response.  I think it would be advisable if this
document described the intended semantic differences between this option
and the siaddr field, as I'm a bit concerned that different bootloaders
might have different expectations of what this file should contain.

If this is specifically intended for a configuration file, it probably
should be named "configuration file server".  In that sense, it would be
a companion option to option 209 specified in draft-ietf-dhc-pxelinux-01.

	-hpa

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