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Panic's stevenf: Time to Dump FTP
Merlin Mann | Jul 14 2008
stevenf.com (“Don’t Use FTP”)
A lot of people who have used FTP daily for years are surprised to learn that they’re sending everything in the clear – that means the stuff you’re uploading as well as your actual password. Makes you think twice about what you’re throwing through the air as you update your blog templates via “free WiFi.” Steven says:
I agree. If you’re unsure whether your host will let you do SFTP (and SSH in general), ask. You may indeed need special permission (many providers “jail” garden-variety users in a way that disallows SSH without special permission). You may also need to find the correct port. On my host, A2, for example, you have to run SSH and SFTP on the unconventional port 7822, but it works like a charm once you’re up. Great suggestion, Steven. Worth getting the word out. 9 Comments
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 It's not just the cryptoSubmitted by stevenf on July 14, 2008 - 3:00pm.
Nate, you make several good points from the POV of a hosting provider that I hadn’t considered. Encryption is important, and FTP-TLS does provide that, but it doesn’t help with any of the other issues, as it’s just the same old protocol tunneled over a secure connection. We get daily emails from users baffled by why “simple” things like setting modification dates or changing permissions won’t work for them. Or why they get timeouts when trying to upload or download something, even though it works fine for the guy down the hall. We can sometimes resolve these problems, but a lot of the time, it’s genuinely a server problem that we can’t fix without breaking some unknown other number of users with the opposite problem. It’s an unwinnable balancing act that we workaround as best we can, but there is no 100% reliable set of workarounds that works for everybody as there are simply so many different varieties of FTP server, each with their own unique bugs and behaviors. A great deal of buggy servers don’t even uniquely identify themselves, so we can only guess which set of workarounds to apply. SFTP provides a better experience at the end-user level. For people who want to just get a file from here to there, it just works. And that’s why I think it’s a better option for the future. » POSTED IN:
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