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It exists because HTTP is not a good replacement for it. It's especially mediocre when you want to download/upload multiple files like a directory with many fi
by takeda 9y ago
It exists because HTTP is not a good replacement for it.
It's especially mediocre when you want to download/upload multiple files like a directory with many files inside of it.
A friend recently shared with me his file collection, through OwnCloud. It was such a pain to download. Each file is a separate link. I can't use wget to pull it, because of authentication. It had some cli tools, but it was buggy and couldn't make it work. And of course no ftp. Essentially it forced me to click every single file. I couldn't even verify the files downloaded correctly.
FTP is actually great for what it does and with clients like lftp it's fairly enjoyable to use. If you want to kill it, better make a worthy alternative.
- zaggynl 9y agoOwncloud/Nextcloud has WebDAV support as well, though that's not great either I guess :/
- rootkea 9y ago> I can't use wget to pull it, because of authentication. What are you talking about? Wget supports --user and --password options.
- GuB-42 9y agoBesides the lack of encryption and proper authentication in the base protocol, it also has a two ports requirement that make it troublesome with firewalls/NAT. The two port system allows a separate, text based control protocol with the ability to transfer files between two remote systems (FXP). These features don't really matter anymore and the second one is a security nightmare. A better alternative would be SFTP, which is based on SSH and is pre-installed on most UNIX-like system. The only problem is that web browsers don't support it natively.