FTP is 50 years old • Hacker News Board

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#171

Post by admax88q » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 5:44 AM UTC

winrid wrote: post #110

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…

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.

Yeah totally I hear you. If you have to support many external clients using an existing ftp implementation makes lot more sense.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#172

Post by axiolite » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 6:00 AM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #56

goda90 wrote: post #3

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

If we're limiting it to "used by computers", and "actually used in some meaningful non-hobby volume" maybe the T1/DS1 TDMA protocol? That dates back to 1962. Or maybe morse code counts as a protocol?, Still around in VOR (VHF omnidirectional range) and NDB (Non-directional beacon) in the aviation world.

RS-232 (1960) is still going strong.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#173

Post by klodolph » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 6:18 AM UTC

axiolite wrote: post #168

klodolph wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are probably battle tested implementations in e.g. Python, Java or other safe-ish languages to build on? My experience... there aren't a ton of choices in this space. There are a few FTP servers designed to power B2B backend services. Many of the options are designed only to provide access to the local filesystem.

> My experience... there aren't a ton of choices in this space. There are a few FTP servers designed to power B2B backend services. Many of the options are designed only to provide access to the local filesystem. The "local filesystem" doesn't have to be a local file system. It's just a good, common abstraction useful for interoperability. Why not "rclone mount" your Google Drive, or use some other FUSE based file sy…

I don't think I agree that the local filesystem is a good, common abstraction. It's a serviceable abstraction most of the time, and a terrible abstraction at other times. This isn't just some contrarian stance I'm taking--I've just spent too much time fighting with filesystem semantics on too many OSs.

Going through FUSE is, in my mind, a last resort.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#174

Post by cybert00th » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 6:24 AM UTC

I'm 54, so news like this is a little bit of a scary reminder of my mortality. :-(

Still, a couple of years back now I had to setup an IP-limited SFTP server for our comms team. But I made them 'sign in blood' that it was a temporary solution until their supplier could implement a more secure alternative. Like I said, it was a few years ago...

FTP definitely still has its uses, it just needs careful thought and setup.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#175

Post by dirkt » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:48 AM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #152

dheera wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good old days ... Username: anonymous Anonymous login accepted, enter e-mail address as password. Password: aoeu@aoeu.com I bet aoeu.com and asdf.com got a good amount of unwanted mail back then.

I get ASDF, but what is AOEU based on?

https://www.aoeu.com/

> It resulted from a typo. I was writing a domain registration system for an ISP and, during some debugging, forgot to use the --no-act command line flag and ended up registering aoeu.com for real. Since it was so easy to type, I kept it.

The letters A O E U are the first four characters of the left hand on a Dvorak keyboard, which is the layout I use.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#176

Post by spacemanmatt » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 11:17 AM UTC

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?

Security was their whole rationale given.

I had some related thoughts. They may have a strong content filter on their incoming web. I was sending them a CSV but we had to talk about it like it was a proprietary-format Excel document for the sake of those who would eventually be loading it with Excel.

My best guess eventually was that FTP was considered the best way to go around their content filter on purpose. Makes negative sense to me.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#177

Post by gnufx » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 11:33 AM UTC

cpr wrote: post #71

Fun trivia: in the early days of the ARPAnet, mail was delivered (at least on PDP-10's) by FTP-appending a message in to the receipients mailbox file. (Which was protected as append-only to world (owner, group, world).) Didn't last long, obviously, but that was back in the days when every site had a well-publicized guest login and you could telnet anywhere. (Well, OK, in 1972 there were only a few dozen nodes, but th…

Back in the days of X.25 and the UK "coloured book" protocols, grey book email went over blue book "network independent FTP" (in batch). I don't know how NIFTP compared with ARPANET FTP as a protocol, though.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#178

Post by tuwtuwtuwtuw » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 12:55 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #161

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Until you realize that the two ports commonly involve dealing with middleware that cant handle it properly.

You will have similar issues with other protocols as well. I have seen physical bandwidth limiters, windows drivers, corrupt winsock LSPs etc mess with IMAP traffic. I have seen middleware replacing SMTP commands sent from a client to server for no good reason, such as replacing "EHLO hostname" with "EHLO **".

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#179

Post by LocalH » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #144

poyu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because -very- few people use it per their telemetry so they don't want to maintain it anymore. It makes sense to throw out a sizeable chunk of code that is only being used by 0.1% of your users. Lftp is great command line replacement for it and extremely scriptable.

They kinda need to stop acting like their telemetry is the full picture. Their telemetry led them to believe that compact mode was barely used, yet look at the community backlash (which they summarily ignore because "muh telemetry").

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#180

Post by TheManInThePub » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

smoe wrote: post #133

kypro wrote: post #73

Not that I think we should go back, but I do miss the wildwest days of web development when it was still acceptable to FTP untested code straight to production. For my first dev job we would develop on production using an FTP client to push up changes on save. One day I was writing an SQL UPDATE statement and I forgot to include a WHERE clause. I basically nuked the entire product DB and it took days to recover becau…

The backend team in one of my previous jobs (around 2010) had an interesting file locking mechanism. All the developer were sat around one table but you couldn’t see each other behind the dual screens. So every hour or so, somebody stood up to inform the team that he is going to be editing file xyz, so please don’t touch. It wasn’t production though, everyone was just working on a shared staging system.

>an interesting file locking mechanism

Only 5 years ago, we had an 'editing stick'. Only the person physically in possession of the editing stick was allowed to make edit the configs to our (early 90's vintage) SCADA system.

Frankly the system worked very well: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

We only got rid of the editing stick when the machinery in question was scrapped.