4 ms·
FTP is broken regardless of NAT. It flat out does not work with a default deny firewall policy.
by justinsaccount 10y ago
FTP is broken regardless of NAT. It flat out does not work with a default deny firewall policy.
- rwmj 10y agoFTP invented in either 1971 or 1985 depending on whether you think RFC 114 or RFC 959 best describes the basic protocol. Simple packet-filtering firewalls invented in 1988. In addition you can force passive mode and confine FTP to a range of ports on just about every server and client out there. So your statement that FTP "flat out does not work" is untrue, unless you mean that your firewall is so much default-deny that you cannot even open incoming ports. However, while it makes me a bit sad, I have to agree that there are better, simpler and more secure protocols now for downloading files. HTTP/2 in particular.
- digi_owl 10y agoHow well do HTTP/2 handle the transfer of whole directory trees?
- sp332 10y agoIt's still a little kludgy, but it got a lot better in November when Firefox joined Chrome and Edge in implementing "folder upload". https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/50#Files_and_directories https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/50#File...
- johannes1234321 10y agoIn the use case of kernel.org a folder download feature would be needed, maybe even recursive.
- jabl 10y agoThere's webdav, but it seems to me it never caught on for some reason, and it's mostly dead these days.
- johannes1234321 10y agoI tried implementing WebDAV servers some 10+ years ago. Back then this was a major pain with different clients expecting and sending different properties etc. No idea how this looks these days.
- notalaser 10y agoI think I last tried it four years ago or so. Not much had changed. I briefly used Apache as a server; I think the server was fine, but the open source clients were flaky at best. I also used to have a hosting account that included WebDAV support, among others, but I never got any client to work with it except for the web interface bolted on top of that thing. I'm surprised to see WebDAV mentioned here, to be honest, I thought it was a dead horse everywhere except in enterprise.
- RickHull 10y agoHow about WebDAV? Is that minimally relevant these days? If not, what has superseded it? The modern web is much more about routes, resources, and URLs than directories and files.
- mcguire 10y ago...and can you transfer data from one server to another without downloading it locally?
- ams6110 10y agorsync will do it nicely.
- KirinDave 10y agoBy sequentially transmitting whole directory trees? FTP-the-protocol never had anything useful to say here. It's always been about FTP-the-client and these didn't need things like "control channels" and "active mode" to do what they're doing. FTP is a pretty conceited protocol, and one that deserves to go away. People say it made more sense in the 80's, but I was there and even then *NIX/Solaris admins found FTP to be about as much fun as that IRC pingback identd service; which is to say not very fun.
- takeda 10y agoSorry, but HTTP/2 is not a panacea for everything, especially for transferring large files. FTP would actually transfers files faster than HTTP/2.
- arcbyte 10y agoAgreed. HTTP2 is garbage.