Interestingly, although TFTP expects to be used on UDP, the RFC also notes it can run over other datagram protocols. Interestingly the Cisco implementation of tftp for copying to/from a Cisco device does have a mechanism to check for packet delivery and if a packet were to be dropped the Cisco tftp would detect this and generate an error.'īTW, my understanding of TFTP, as documented in rfc1350, is that it does appear to define reliability mechanisms. 'yes the tftp protocol itself as a UDP protocol does not have a reliability mechanism. I also observe that in modern networking devices performance is much better, memory is much less of an issue, file sizes are larger, and now packet drops are more common (especially over WAN connections) and so many of us are preferring to use more reliable, and sometimes faster, protocols like ftp. Many people do continue to use tftp and I agree that 'habit' is likely a major part of why this continues. If failure is rare and recovery is easy then why would you want a more complicated protocol?

It frequently ran in environment where packet loss was rare and if there was a problem it was easy enough to run it again. + tftp was generally regarded as 'good enough'. + the files being transmitted were generally pretty small which reduces the opportunity for errors and makes recovery from error pretty easy.

+ tftp requires less memory than ftp which in the early days was attractive. + tftp is a more simple protocol as compared to ftp etc and especially in the early days the lower overhead was attractive. The original post asks this question ' why people prefer to use this unreliable TFTP to download files?' I believe that there are several possible answers Interestingly the Cisco implementation of tftp for copying to/from a Cisco device does have a mechanism to check for packet delivery and if a packet were to be dropped the Cisco tftp would detect this and generate an error. yes the tftp protocol itself as a UDP protocol does not have a reliability mechanism.

Download cisco tftp config