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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: ARIN Policy on IP-based Web Hosting
On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Jason Slagle wrote: > The problem is that SCP is several orders of magnitude slower then FTP. I > use scp, rsync (on top of ssh), nfs, and several other methods of moving > files around, and ftp blows them all away. > > You also need to build a ftp like structure on top of it. ie: I pick the > files I want instead of having to know the filenames. > > Until this happens, I can see no viable alternative to FTP. HTTP, perchance? The only things missing are a machine-parsable file indexing method (which would be easy enough to standardize on if someone felt the need to do so; think a "text/directory" MIME type, which would benefit more than just HTTP, or use a multipart list of URLs), and server-to-server transfers coordinated from your client, which most people have disabled anyway for security reasons. But, you get the added benefit of MIME typing, human-beneficial markup, caching if you have a nearby cache, inherent firewall friendliness (no data connection foolishness), and simple negotiation of encrypted transfers (SSL). And for command-line people like myself, there's lynx, w3m, and wget. FTP is disturbingly behind on features, some of which (decent certificate authentication, full-transaction encryption, data type labelling, and cache usefulness) are becoming more important today. Either the FTP RFC needs a near-complete overhaul, or the HTTP and other RFCs need to be updated to include the missing functionality. -- Edward S. Marshall <[email protected]> http://www.nyx.net/~emarshal/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. ]
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