FTP
FTP
Posted Feb 21, 2023 0:21 UTC (Tue) by skissane (subscriber, #38675)In reply to: GDB 13.1 released by ianmcc
Parent article: GDB 13.1 released
One area in which FTP is still the best option however – surviving mainframe and minicomputer systems (which are greatly diminished from their former glory, but still with us, and I'm sure at least some of them will still be here, even further diminished, in 20 years time). Most of those systems have file systems which support "record-oriented files", in which the filesystem is aware of and enforces the division of the file into records, either fixed length (with the record length defined at file creation time) or variable length (each record starts with a header giving its length, and sometimes also some flags). Examples of such systems include OpenVMS, non-Linux IBM mainframe operating systems (z/OS, z/VM, z/TPF and VSEn), IBM i (formerly AS/400), and most surviving non-IBM mainframe lines (Unisys, Fujitsu, Atos/Bull). If you want to transfer a record-oriented file from OpenVMS to z/OS, keeping the record boundaries intact – the FTP protocol can do that out of the box, HTTP(S) or SFTP don't support that.
Another area in which FTP seems to still be hanging on is scientific computing, where GridFTP is used to transfer massive data sets. GridFTP is a bunch of extensions defined to the classic FTP protocol. GridFTP is still actively used, although it has seemed to have fallen in popularity ever since its main backer (Globus) transitioned from being an open source project to a paid SaaS offering with proprietary clients. IBM Aspera performs much better (and isn't based on FTP at all), but costs a lot more $$$$.
Posted Feb 21, 2023 12:40 UTC (Tue)
by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248)
[Link] (1 responses)
• Directory listings are the output of "ls". Have you ever tried having files owned by users or groups with spaces in them? Say… "Domain Users". Clients fall flat on their face trying to parse the output as they have to split fields by whitespace, which obviously fails with such user & group names.
Sure, you can use it in certain circumstances, but it's not a general-purpose solution.
Posted Feb 22, 2023 7:59 UTC (Wed)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link]
Posted Feb 21, 2023 17:55 UTC (Tue)
by eduperez (guest, #11232)
[Link]
FTP
• FTPS is even more broken (assuming you mean encrypting the control connection, too, not just the data connection). With FTPS you can only use the passive mode, and your server must not be behind any kind of NAT. Why? Because no firewall device can parse the encrypted control connection & can therefore not determine the dynamically-allocated port numbers the server & client use.
FTP
FTP