On 20. dec 2004, at 22:29, Russell E. Owen wrote:
Jim Tittsler jwt@OnJapan.net wrote:
But seriously, encourage people to move to the current century and use SFTP. :-)
I regretfully disagree. sftp does not support a text mode, making life miserable if you are going between platforms. Actually, the modern sftp standard *does* include a text mode, but few sftp clients and servers support it. Very annoying for what should be the obvious replacement for ftp. Personally, I use ftp over an ssh tunnel. At worst, it takes a quick command in terminal to set up the tunnel, then use any ftp client. And some ftp clients will set up the tunnel for you.
There is also something called FTPS, which is ssl (really TLS) used from inside regular FTP. So it's just an extension to FTP really. It works along the same lines as TLS used with SMTP, so the tcp ports are the same, and initial connection is done unencrypted. The server then informs the client that it supports TLS, and they negotiate the secure connection before authentication.