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Who still uses FTP, for anything?

Who still uses FTP, for anything?

Posted Jul 6, 2011 16:07 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669)
In reply to: Who still uses FTP, for anything? by Jonno
Parent article: Vsftpd backdoor discovered in source code (The H)

What about anonymous FTP?

What about legacy client software lacking sftp support?


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Who still uses FTP, for anything?

Posted Jul 7, 2011 7:25 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> What about anonymous FTP?

Assuming that the anonymous users aren't allowed to upload files, HTTP should be a suitable replacement.

Who still uses FTP, for anything?

Posted Jul 7, 2011 10:35 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Kinda, sorta – as long as you don't rely on FTP features such as partial downloads, wildcard-filename downloads or translation of line endings for text files.

Of course there are ways of getting these sorted on an HTTP server, but they may involve added inconvenience for the downloading user or the server operator. For example, an FTP server will give you a directory listing but an HTTP server usually won't (not as long as you don't enable it explicitly, and then usually in an HTML format that programs must laboriously parse).

Who still uses FTP, for anything?

Posted Jul 7, 2011 12:04 UTC (Thu) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]

You know, FTP doesn't give file listings in a fixed format either, but as a plaintext file, which the client must parse differently depending on what FTP server you are running, and sometimes based on the LC_xxx settings on the server...

The closest thing to a standard there is is "do like POSIX `ls -la`", but that is not universally followed, especially by ftp servers on non-POSIX hosts...

For HTTP there is at least webdav, which can provide a standardized machine parseable directory listing...

Who still uses FTP, for anything?

Posted Jul 8, 2011 7:53 UTC (Fri) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> partial downloads

HTTP supports that, by way of the "Range:" request header.

> translation of line endings for text files

That really shouldn't be necessary anymore, since many programs (text editors, etc.) support the multiple different line-ending types. (And of course it will corrupt binary files if turned on by mistake.)

Who still uses FTP, for anything?

Posted Jul 8, 2011 8:02 UTC (Fri) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

(I should have linked to the HTTP/1.1 RFC instead.)

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