Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by big_chungus 2499 days ago
FTP is basically useful as a single-use protocol: file transfer only. File transfer only allows a more stripped-down, dedicated server with better security. Vsftpd and others have excellent security specifically tailored to permission-based file transfers with access control lists etc. You will rarely find a comparable http option. It's not perfect, but there are also good partes and reasons why it's still around. Secure FTP is still a good option for some cases.
1 comments
anyfoo 2499 days ago
As written in another comment, you will find FTP to actually be a truly horrendous protocol, at least from today's perspective. I'm not sure there is anything that FTP offers, that the rsync or sftp, for example, offer much better (or simply HTTP if it's only in one direction), and then some.

SFTP is actually not just FTP over SSH. The protocol is different precisely to get rid of a lot of the outdated nuisances.

link
takeda 2499 days ago
FTP became a nightmare to use thanks to introduction of NAT, it was developed before NAT existed so it wasn't designed with it in mind.

As for rsync, sftp, scp those are heavily tied to ssh, rsync to the point that you actually ssh to host and call rsync command. rsync has a server mode as well, but almost no one uses it.

link
big_chungus 2499 days ago
Yes, there are lots of issues with FTP. I've worked with it, and it is in many ways a nightmare.

That aside, you can use FTP for auth and ACL in of which HTTP and rsync just aren't capable. I'm not sure this is a flaw in the core protocol so much as the tooling, but there you have it. FTP config syntax may often be byzantine. But it's widely supported (especially on old, low-spec, or embedded devices). For newer stuff, yeah sftp is probably better. But it's still got its uses.

link
georgebarnett 2499 days ago
Completely agree it still has its uses. So does Cobol and any number of older legacy tooling.

That’s not the point we are discussing though; This is specifically regarding Chromium supporting FTP.

link
layoutIfNeeded 2499 days ago
And that’s also why SFTP is slower than FTP: because it’s a separate protocol implementing its own windowing which interferes with TCP’s, thus performance goes down the toilet when using SFTP over a high latency connection.
link