Mac Open Source?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 01:10:22PM -0500, Aaron Vegh wrote:
> > You mean besides using a sane protocol instead?  No idea for that.
> 
> Easy Lennart! Turns out Transmit and CyberDuck talk SFTP.

ftp was designed when everyone had their own ip and no one had to
firewall themselves from the rest of the internet (Those days will never
be back) and  opens connections both from the client to the server and
from the server to the client.  later another mode was added that
doesn't do that, but what the default mode is seems to depend on the
server and the client and the combination there of.  Trying to forward
ftp to a machine using NAT is a serious pain due to the port opening in
both directions, and of course it also uses plain text passwords (making
it as crazy to use in general as telnet).  Wrapping it in ssl fixes the
password issue, but on the other hand now you need ssl certificates and
to change the client and server to use a new protocol.

There is no good reason a protocol can't be implemented using a single
socket opened by the client connecting to the server.  Multiplexing data
transfers of different parts of your communications is not that hard.

So ftp sucks. :)  Since scp/sftp exists it might as well be used
instead.  And I think more systems run ssh servers than ftp servers by
now, so it is also more common than ftp in that case.  Doesn't support
anonymous users, but oh well.  If you want that, then I guess ftp is
still what you want, or a web page with scripts to allow file posts, or
use webdav.

Lennart Sorensen
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