Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

Posted Dec 3, 2010 16:47 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H) by bronson
Parent article: Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

HTTP does not have sane directory listing capability.

Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

Posted Dec 3, 2010 23:20 UTC (Fri) by ajf (guest, #10844) [Link] (7 responses)

Well, there is WebDAV... but I'm not sure how comfortable I am calling it sane.

Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

Posted Dec 4, 2010 17:55 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (6 responses)

It works for me.

I use it as a file system in Linux and in Windows. There is native support for it in all OSes nowadays. I like it.

Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

Posted Dec 4, 2010 21:48 UTC (Sat) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link] (5 responses)

Yeah, but the directory listing in WebDAV is not something that I would like to call sane though. Too much complicated xml stuff.

Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

Posted Dec 6, 2010 3:27 UTC (Mon) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (4 responses)

FTP doesn't even *have* a standard for directory listing. The closest thing it has is the LIST command, which returns a bunch of totally free-form text. Want to display that to the user in a graphical form, or use it in some kind of scripting context? Good luck-- you'll have to write N different parsers for your favorite N different ftp servers.

Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

Posted Dec 6, 2010 17:46 UTC (Mon) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

I had to do that one time. It was only three parsers for me because that covered most options.

I believe it was Windows IIS, Linux (all the FTP daemons seemed to just use ls format) and I think BSD had one just a little different.

Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

Posted Dec 6, 2010 21:13 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

> FTP doesn't even *have* a standard for directory listing. The closest thing it has is the LIST command, which returns a bunch of totally free-form text.

At least it has the command.

> Good luck-- you'll have to write N different parsers for your favorite N different ftp servers.

It is probably not very hard considering I never met nor even heard about this problem before now.

Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

Posted Dec 7, 2010 13:30 UTC (Tue) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (1 responses)

With all due respect, it's clearly a massive whole in the FTP spec, and another key example of how not to design a protocol, up there with the default (non-passive) control channel stuff. You personally not having experienced the problem doesn't really change that.

Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

Posted Dec 7, 2010 14:30 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> You personally not having experienced the problem doesn't really change that.

Uh, "personally"?

Will all due respect, users do not care a bit about how is badly designed the protocol or whatever other obscure internal implementation detail. They just want features and FTP has sadly still an edge in a number of use cases. Sad but true.

Back door in ProFTPD FTP server (The H)

Posted Dec 4, 2010 16:55 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Indeed. FTP sucks in many ways but sorry HTTP is still NOT a good substitute for FTP. Whereas FTP is very close to a remote file system, HTTP does not come near.

rsync rocks, it "just" needs better GUIs.