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FTP is 50 years old

filestash.app

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Re: FTP is 50 years old

#101

Post by tuwtuwtuwtuw »

recursive wrote: post #90
admax88q wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That honestly sounds more complicated. FTP isn't that difficult of a protocol, especially if you only need to support one known client, you can take all sort of shortcuts. If you deploy an existing FTP server, and _then_ integrate with it at the filesystem level you now have two components, and your sysadmin requirements grow. Now you gotta administrate an FTP server that's probably written for classic UNIX single se…

Active mode is pretty weird. Coordinating a single client across two ports sounds difficult to me, but I've never implemented it. If that's not a difficult protocol, then what is?

Http3, IMAP, Caldav and MAPI?

Cordinating a client across two ports sounds trivial compared to for example properly implementing client and server versions of IMAP search commands when no client or server follows the specification.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#102

Post by dec0dedab0de »

skissane wrote: post #97
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #38

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.

> 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? The FTP protocol provides lots of features that SFTP doesn't. However, most of those distinctive features are rarely implemented in FTP clients for Unix-like systems or Windows. It is more common to find them implemented in mainframe or minicomputer FTP implementations: - Record-oriented fil…

This might be the best reply I have ever gotten. Thank you. This certainly explains why I hear about some companies enforcing FTPs. It kind of makes me wish SFTP was just full fledged ftp tunneled through ssh. I cringe when I remember trying to explain active/passive ftp to users when I did tech support for a local ISP, or later to server admins when I managed firewalls.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#103

Post by lolc »

And just the other month, we switched a transmission from SFTP to FTP because we couldn't be bothered to deal with the bottlenecks in the SFTP stack. HTTP? Maybe next year :-)

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#105

Post by the_af »

gkop wrote: post #63
jbverschoor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought a byte ment “by eight” What’s a nibble of a byte is 8bits

By the way, the handy word for an 8-bit byte is “octet” (I have not observed octet used in the software industry, only in school. Don’t use it at work or you might come across as an ass...) I was curious and searched HN and found this 2012 comment explaining octet is essentially an anachronism, as bytes have been standardized at 8 bits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4649528 . Feeling old!

I remember my Commodore 64's book (in Spanish) mentioned octets. This brings back memories!

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#106

Post by throwawayftphub »

Tangentially related. About 10 years ago I considered an idea that would allow websites to accept large files. The web admin would either embed our company's page as an iframe or just link to our whitelabeled url, such as "mydomain.ftphub.com". The admin would then get an email with a download link. Or they could reverse the process and send a link to a customer the way yousendit does.

I still own the domains ftphub.com and ftphub.net, and I put the domains at auction since it looks like I'll never get around to it.

Should I work on this ? Or has this opportunity been commoditized to the point where I there is no way it could turn a profit ? Also has anyone under 30 even heard of "ftp" ? The abbreviation in our brand but not sure it's meaningful anymore. Thanks and sorry if this is too off topic.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#107

Post by cumwolf »

throwawayftphub wrote: post #106

Tangentially related. About 10 years ago I considered an idea that would allow websites to accept large files. The web admin would either embed our company's page as an iframe or just link to our whitelabeled url, such as "mydomain.ftphub.com". The admin would then get an email with a download link. Or they could reverse the process and send a link to a customer the way yousendit does. I still own the domains ftphub.…

under 30 and yes ive heard of FTP. I used them at school to submit assignments for some classes and I use FTPs (albeit sparingly) at my current place of work.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#109

Post by poyu »

molticrystal wrote: post #47

On the other side upcoming Firefox 90 is removing support for FTP: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/04/15/built-in-ftp-impl...

Aww man, I wonder what the reason is. Firefox is always my go to application for opening things I only use every once in a while.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#110

Post by winrid »

admax88q wrote: post #85
winrid wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious on the motivation. Why not run a regular FTP server and have your application periodically look for new files to process? For horizontal scaling, you just take a distributed lock on the file name.

That honestly sounds more complicated. FTP isn't that difficult of a protocol, especially if you only need to support one known client, you can take all sort of shortcuts. If you deploy an existing FTP server, and _then_ integrate with it at the filesystem level you now have two components, and your sysadmin requirements grow. Now you gotta administrate an FTP server that's probably written for classic UNIX single se…

The lock would be handled by something like Redis or a DB.

But yeah, if you only need to support one client, I can see the reasoning. It would never have flied at any of the places I've worked, though, having to support tons of clients.

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