“File Transfer Protocol (FTP) marks its 40th anniversary on Saturday (April 16). The venerable network protocol was first proposed by Abhay Bhushan of MIT in April 1971 as a means to transfer large files between disparate systems that made up ARPANet, the celebrated forerunner to the modern interweb. The protocol required a minimum of handshaking, and even more crucially was tolerant of temporary interruptions during long file transfer sessions, making it far more suitable for the job than anything available at the time or HTTP, which came years later.”
Yeeey!
Have they made a similar replacement protocol that is as widely supported but only requires only firewall hole?
SFTP and SCP are wonderful, and support the many authentication methods of SSH, but what exists for anonymous use? A simple web server + DownThemAll?
WebDAV?
I read somewhere, that Jabber could be considered as good “replacement” for FTP.
Best replacement for anonymous FTP ? Probably HTTP
FTP should have been dead at least 10 years ago….
It’s such a pain to firewall FTP
Die FTP, die…. Die FTP, die
Not only that, everything is in the clear, including your password.
What is the solution if you should believe some people ? FTPS. WHich is FTP with SSL (like HTTPS) that solves the cleartext problem.
Now they made the other problem a lot worse, the firewall/NAT can’t see which ports should be opened and thus firewalling became completely impossible (other than: just open these 1000 or so ports and hope for the best).
No FTP hasn’t been a solution for a long, long time.
But why does Microsoft webserver (IIS) not support anything else than FTP and FTPS ?
I definitely hate Microsoft support of that Technology, in Visual Studio 2010 the ClickOnce assisted publish method only works with FTP (Microsoft’s implementation of WebDAV sucks), 2011 and I can’t use SSH friendly methods (I tunnel the connection by hand)
WebDAV is a pretty messy protocol anyway, trying to create a minimal version is already lots of code. Not counting the XML-parser.
There is a experimental API for HTML5 for multi-file upload (drag directory into browser).
It is just a simple POST.
That sounds like a much simpler solution.
Edited 2011-04-18 11:22 UTC
FTPS is broken by definition because it starts with FTP and adds on security. Furthermore, it’s only a trivial amount of security (SSL). If you’re going to do it, do it right.
FTP is a bit like Ethernet in that any replacement is doomed to be known by the same name (and this has happened several times). The FTP RFC’d 40 years ago bears little resemblance to the current incarnation.
FTP as a protocol is an absolute nightmare even if you don’t support every older version of it. Sane people don’t use FTP for any reason beyond “anonymous download”–where they’d be better of using HTTP these days. The best alternative at the moment is SFTP, which doesn’t have anything to do with FTP and is not insane.
The problem with SFTP is that it doesn’t have any option for unencrypted download.
Secure authentication is great but the extra CPU load to transfer files is insane. I have some systems that can’t reach gigabit transfer speed using SFTP because they hit the CPU limit.