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Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?

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Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?

#81

Post by kragen »

dmd wrote: post #65
jlgaddis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my youth, I probably downloaded hundreds of gigabytes from wuarchive.wustl.edu, ftp.cdrom.com, metalab.unc.edu, and the like. Over a dial-up modem, no less. Before I had local Internet access (i.e., long distance calls), I used the various "FTP by e-mail" services with my free "Juno" e-mail account (they had toll-free numbers for access!).

"hundreds of gigabytes"? Do you mean megabytes? Don't know about you, but when I was downloading stuff from those sites, downloading "hundreds of gigabytes" would have literally have taken a few years at minimum, many decades more realistically.

200 gigabytes at 57600 bits per second is a bit under 46 weeks. They could usually sustain that bandwidth; the bottleneck was usually the modem.

Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?

#83

Post by andai »

bane wrote: post #13
userbinator wrote: post #2

I wonder how many of those are just mirrors of Linux distros and other open-source software, how many have more interesting things (including software), and how many of those were deliberately configured to be open for sharing. There is the somewhat-well-known filesearch.ru if you want to look for things on this non-HTTP part of the Internet. (If I remember correctly, Google used to index FTPs too and you'd get plent…

There's still a uprising number of niche ftp site around: MSX, Demoscene, etc. Mostly older scenes that pre-date the WWW and are still around. I think it might be useful to test every port on every ip to see what happens protocol-wise. Limiting to just common ports is probably missing lots of cool things.

How many ports are there?

Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?

#84

Post by hellofunk »

DonHopkins wrote: post #67

I used to leave a file called README on my public ftp directory, which contained only: cat: README: No such file or directory I'd occasionally get email from frustrated people who had trouble trying to read the README file, so I'd tell them to simply run "emacs README", and emacs would solve all of their problems. I don't know if my passive aggressive emacs evangelism ever worked, because I never heard back from them…

hilarious. reminds me of many good old days tricks and fun.

Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?

#85

Post by aeinstein1 »

andai wrote: post #83
bane wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still a uprising number of niche ftp site around: MSX, Demoscene, etc. Mostly older scenes that pre-date the WWW and are still around. I think it might be useful to test every port on every ip to see what happens protocol-wise. Limiting to just common ports is probably missing lots of cool things.

How many ports are there?

According to Reserved IP addresses there are 588,514,304 reserved addresses and since there are 4,294,967,296 (2^32) IPv4 addressess in total, there are 3,706,452,992 public addresses. There are 65536 ports, so one would have to scan all those ports on all those addresses.

Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?

#86

Post by dmd »

kragen wrote: post #81
dmd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hundreds of gigabytes"? Do you mean megabytes? Don't know about you, but when I was downloading stuff from those sites, downloading "hundreds of gigabytes" would have literally have taken a few years at minimum, many decades more realistically.

200 gigabytes at 57600 bits per second is a bit under 46 weeks. They could usually sustain that bandwidth; the bottleneck was usually the modem.

Ah, I was at 2400 bps until I had a university ethernet connection.

Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?

#87

Post by nissehulth »

kragen wrote: post #81
dmd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hundreds of gigabytes"? Do you mean megabytes? Don't know about you, but when I was downloading stuff from those sites, downloading "hundreds of gigabytes" would have literally have taken a few years at minimum, many decades more realistically.

200 gigabytes at 57600 bits per second is a bit under 46 weeks. They could usually sustain that bandwidth; the bottleneck was usually the modem.

When I was using dialup speed in the 90s, I certainly didn't have any gigabyte storage.

Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?

#90

Post by 13of40 »

nissehulth wrote: post #87
kragen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200 gigabytes at 57600 bits per second is a bit under 46 weeks. They could usually sustain that bandwidth; the bottleneck was usually the modem.

When I was using dialup speed in the 90s, I certainly didn't have any gigabyte storage.

One of my favorite ways to gauge "how far we've come" is that I remember connecting to a BBS in Europe in the early 90's that boasted 30 gigabytes of downloadable files. That would have filled up about 20000 floppy disks, and barring any kind of creative phreaking would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to download.
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