From: Ulli Horlacher <Ulli.Horlacher@RUS.Uni-Stuttgart.DE>
Subject: sendfile 2.1 - async file transfer service
Date: Tue,  3 Mar 1998 14:36:18 GMT

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----


                        Sendfile / SAFT

Sendfile is an asynchronous file transfer service for the Internet, like
the sendfile facility in Bitnet: Any user A can send files to another user B
without B being active in any way.

A user based data exchange via anonymous ftp server is complicated and in
respect to security out of question. Sending of files with e-mail is an
asynchronous process but complicated too (binary data have to be
specially encoded before sending and decoded after receiving). You can not
transfer large files this way because many mail systems limit the maximum
size of mails. With both procedures you also loose nearly all file
attributes.

Sendfile for UNIX, which is an implementation of the SAFT protocol (Simple
Asynchronous File Transfer) now offers you a true asynchronous file
transfer service for the Internet. Virtually any form of file can be sent,
including encrypted ones. The SAFT protocol will be submitted as an RFC in
the near future.

Sendfile has been developped (of course :-) ) on Linux, but will compile
on most UNIX platforms, too.


Source:	ftp://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/unix/comm/sendfile/sendfile.tar.gz
Info:	http://www.belwue.de/belwue/software/saft/index-us.html


The most important features are:


- - sendfile can send any file at any size reliable, secure and effecient
  from any user A to any user B on the Internet.

- - sendfile uses a (gzip or bzip2) compressed link for transfers.

- - sendfile can automaticly guess the correct file type (binary, source,
  text) and will translate EOL markers and the character set, e.g. German
  Umlauts.

- - sendfile has an integrated resend facility: if a transfer has been
  interrupted by any reason, the next transfer will continue at the last
  sent byte.

- - sendfile can transfer whole directory trees.

- - sendfile has integrated pgp support for signing and encryption.

- - sendfile can delete previous sent files (as long as they are in the
  recipient's spool)

- - sendfile can truly send asynchronous, you don't need a permanent
  internet connection. A special sendfile spool daemon will retry every xx
  minutes to deliver the files.

- - With the fetchfile/O-SAFT extension you can retrieve files from a 
  remote host. This is similar to POP-mail, but with secure pgp
  authentification.

- - You can annotate the files you send with a comment.

- - With the addon program sendmsg you can send short messages directly to
  the recipients terminal, this works like write(1), but net-wide.

- - You can bounce (forward) files directly from the spool.

- - You can set up a forward address. Unless like mail, this means that
  new files will not sent first to you, but directly to the forward address.

- - The receive program warns you for dangerous files, like .rhosts.

- - The sendfile daemon has various configuration possibilities to prevent a
  denial of service attack: max # of files, min free disk space, "kill
  files", expire dates, log all transactions, refuse all non-signed files etc.

- - The administrator can deny SAFT services for certain users or do the
  inverse: allow it only for special users.

- - sendfile has NFS and AFS support.

- - SAFT supports Unicode.

- - sendfile runs so far on AIX, BSDI, Convex-OS, Digital Unix,
  FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, NeXTstep/Mach, OSF/1, SunOS 4, SunOS 5
  (Solaris-2) and Ultrix. Implementations for Windows NT and OS/2 will be
  released in the next future.
  
- - SAFT uses the tcp port 487, which has been reserved by the IANA
  (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). An SAFT-RFC is in preparation
  phase.

- -- 
\ Ulli 'Framstag' Horlacher  \ BelWue-Koordination \  framstag@belwue.de \
 \ Universitaet Stuttgart \ Allmandring 30 \ D-70550 Stuttgart \  Germany \
  \ SAFT://saft.belwue.de/framstag         \         HTTP://www.belwue.de/ \
   \          "X.500: Security through Complexity" - Juergen G.             \



- -- 
This article has been digitally signed by the moderator, using PGP.
http://www.iki.fi/mjr/cola-public-key.asc has PGP key for validating signature.
Send submissions for comp.os.linux.announce to: linux-announce@news.ornl.gov
PLEASE remember a short description of the software and the LOCATION.
This group is archived at http://www.iki.fi/liw/linux/cola.html

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3ia
Charset: latin1

iQCVAgUBNPwVYlrUI/eHXJZ5AQFGGgQAg94JA4nlPK7/toOI0Md5RXQYF18ZKHzp
zNC5u5KjA591wlmCCuVJdkftB3VRvZHnXQnsDK8/5zSvq1q/WdG9KEOyvvDR9ciY
L1kegIt9ae6kZuqZ22isBkI9ckE2HvZy/KvGoSdcxxA0hYTIQaHSK3nmT8HVuNSe
DysfIw5iJLc=
=6W7x
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----