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FTP is 50 years old

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Re: FTP is 50 years old

#31

Post by CydeWeys »

peter303 wrote: post #23
goda90 wrote: post #3

What's the oldest protocol that's still regularly used?

British naval signal and letter flags codified 1817. Morse code from 1840s. Ham radio still uses it when signal took weak fir voice. Proficiency was required for a ham license until 2006.

Morse may not be the oldest but my bet is on it being by far the most widely still used of anything nearly two centuries old. I got into ham radio a decade ago and learned Morse (poorly) just because. It already wasn't a requirement, but so many still use it.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#32

Post by ajb »

jswrenn wrote: post #28
ajb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

Ha, I was like "REALLY!?!?" before actually clicking the link. I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth_Single_Sign-on_arch... ...which is an unlikely contender for oldest protocol!

You can consider it a successor protocol :-)

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#33

Post by js2 »

peter303 wrote: post #23
goda90 wrote: post #3

What's the oldest protocol that's still regularly used?

British naval signal and letter flags codified 1817. Morse code from 1840s. Ham radio still uses it when signal took weak fir voice. Proficiency was required for a ham license until 2006.

In my college comp-sci networking class, one of our projects was to figure out a system for sending messages visually between two parties spaced 100 yards (91 meters) apart as quickly as possible.

Each team of four came up with their own signaling method, trying to balance how many bits were transmitted with each symbol with how quickly we could encode/decode the message.

Binoculars were not allowed. We were outside, so we didn't know how windy it would be.

I seem to recall on my team, we were sending two bits per symbol. I think it was just a large cardboard box, we colored each of the four flaps visually distinct, then unfolded one of the flaps for each symbol.

I don't recall a single team thinking to re-purpose naval flags.

Duh.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#34

Post by vagrantJin »

crazypython wrote: post #18
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on how you define "protocol". ASCII dates from 1963, and that's still the baseline for text-based protocols. FTP predates Ethernet, Token Ring and ARCNET. It predates TCP/IP. For an actual protocol, and not just a simple format specification like ASCII, it doesn't get older than that in current use.

ASCII is a very obvious format. If you take the english alphabet and symbols, it fits almost perfectly in the first 7 bits. In 5th grade I tried encoding English in binary, and noticed how I accidentally reinvented ASCII.

Encode English in Binary in 5th grade? You must be a smart cookie.

In 5th grade, I had the attention span of a fruit fly. Probably would have tried drawing phalluses in ascii if I had known about it.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#36

Post by 0x0 »

crazypython wrote: post #18
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on how you define "protocol". ASCII dates from 1963, and that's still the baseline for text-based protocols. FTP predates Ethernet, Token Ring and ARCNET. It predates TCP/IP. For an actual protocol, and not just a simple format specification like ASCII, it doesn't get older than that in current use.

ASCII is a very obvious format. If you take the english alphabet and symbols, it fits almost perfectly in the first 7 bits. In 5th grade I tried encoding English in binary, and noticed how I accidentally reinvented ASCII.

I wouldn't say it's obvious. There's some careful decisions in the design that might not be obvious at first sight, such as having upper and lowercase characters be the same save for a single bit.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#37

Post by taviso »

raverbashing wrote: post #19

So, do we still have to give our email to enter in Anonymous mode? And can we use PASV?

I always thought it was clever that the PNG format was designed so that readers could catch various kinds of transfer errors, including the error of accidentally using FTP ASCII mode (rather than binary mode). That way you get a very clear error message, rather than some confusing CRC failure.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Rationale.html#R....

(ASCII mode automatically translates line-endings, which can break non-text formats in confusing ways)

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#38

Post by dec0dedab0de »

It's been about a decade since I've used ftp. I'm trying to remember if there is anything it provides that sftp/scp does not? I remember the egress ports being a pain, and encrypting the traffic required ssl certs and being even more of a pain.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#39

Post by dominiek »

Amazing.

I never thought I would say this, but I actually implemented an FTP server in 2020. This was needed to support firmware updates to specific hardware (Electric Vehicle charging stations). Apparently embedded software developers choose FTP whenever a spec doesn't specify how binary file transfers should work.

It was kind of amusing getting FTP to work in a modern cloud environment. I run a single Kubernetes pod with a Node.js based FTP server optimized for one thing: Transferring files between FTP and Google Cloud Storage. A series of ports are specified in the Docker file to enable passive FTP transfers.

Even more amusing was the number of varieties in which FTP was implemented by different hardware manufacturers. I regularly had to dive into the FTP libraries to add support for crazy edge cases (tcpflow in kubectl exec -it is your friend!). Example: one device added a newline in the middle of a command (USER\n myusername)..

The latest curve ball I received this week is that a certain firmware version of a Qualcomm modem chip cannot deal with the size of the IP packets coming from our FTP server... Fun stuff!

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