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FTP is 50 years old

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Re: FTP is 50 years old

#41

Post by Jtsummers »

TwoBit wrote: post #27
spacemanmatt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a finance-industry client require we upload to their FTP server because they couldn't trust downloading the file over HTTPS from our server with a secure/unique URL.

Did they have any rationale for that?

I'm not in finance, but aerospace/defense is similarly change averse. Often things only change when the cost of the old way becomes too great (and even then it's hard) or causes a failure of some sort (security, bad release, missed milestone costing money). I recall at my first job that we had to sit a senior engineer down (in the hierarchy a level or two above the software team) and ask him to flip a switch on a relay board, reliably, every 1/10th of a second to simulate a test scenario. That was the thing that finally persuaded them to ok the purchase of equipment to automate those tests.

And this was a year or so after a major, and costly, rework was required due to a real-world system failure (no fatalities or injuries, fortunately) that would have been caught if testing had been more thorough. But testing wasn't more thorough because we simply couldn't actually flip switches fast enough to simulate a wide enough variety of behaviors, so the testing was woefully incomplete and the timing issue at the heart of the failure was sufficiently complex to be non-discoverable in code and design reviews. Literally having to spend several million out of pocket to fix a broken system wasn't enough on its own to cause them to let us improve our testing methods.

Worth noting, the cost of the new testing equipment was only in the 5-figure range, not the 7-figure range of the rework.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#42

Post by marsven_422 »

dominiek wrote: post #39

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 po…

Why FTP when there is tFTP?

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#43

Post by gogopuppygogo »

dominiek wrote: post #39

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 po…

I’m just glad they used ftp over tftp. Maybe someday they’ll use FTPS but I have my doubts it’ll ever catch on with the popularity of SFTP.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#44

Post by basscomm »

raverbashing wrote: post #19

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

You never had to enter a real email address (or anything that looked like an email address) on any anonymous FTP server I've ever used. You could usually leave it blank, but if a server really wanted me to enter something and I didn't feel like mashing the keyboard, I would sometimes use the address of the server's administrator or some well-known email address that wasn't mine.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#45

Post by tpmx »

dominiek wrote: post #39

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 po…

Implementing an FTP server from scratch that had to be compatible with lots of clients in 2020 was an interesting choice. Just to have it in javascript? Perhaps security-motivated? There are probably battle tested implementations in e.g. Python, Java or other safe-ish languages to build on?

I learned this lesson in the mid 90s when fixing client compatibility bugs in an FTP server module we had built in an interpreted language, because, how hard could it be...

> 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!

Right.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#48

Post by Joker_vD »

js2 wrote: post #33
peter303 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

There is also flag semaphore which is very fast and very recognizable and gives you about 5 bits per signal.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#49

Post by alexhutcheson »

js2 wrote: post #33
peter303 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore would have been good if you needed to send arbitrary text.

Naval flags would be higher bandwidth if you could pre-arrange a modest-sized dictionary of the words and phrases you’d need.

https://www.navalgazing.net/Signalling-Part-1 is a good read.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#50

Post by lightdot »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #43
dominiek wrote: post #39

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 po…

I’m just glad they used ftp over tftp. Maybe someday they’ll use FTPS but I have my doubts it’ll ever catch on with the popularity of SFTP.

Just to note for those who don't know, FTPS and SFTP are completely different protocols.

The similarity of the names often causes confusion, but SFTP has nothing to do with the venerable FTP.

SFTP stands for "SSH file transfer protocol" and it's a completely different beast. IMHO, a somewhat unfortunate naming choice, but that's water under the bridge.

(...while FTPS stands for "FTP over SSL", and that actually uses plain old FTP with an additional SSL/TLS layer...)

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