[lmm]

FTP had better support for doing server-server transfer - you could start a receiver on machine 2 and then trigger a transfer from machine 1 to machine 2 without using your own bandwidth. I guess you can achieve the same thing by doing curl on machine 2 in a screen session or something, but it feels a lot less elegant.

[eythian]

I think scp can do stuff like this, I remember occasionally hitting it when wanting to move a file between two servers that can't talk to each other, expecting it would use my bandwidth/route for the transfer.

[anarcat]

wow. I used ftp for years and even ran my own server for a while and never knew that was a thing. is that something that was actually used to mirror those sites? Debian mirrors certainly don't use this (anymore?) at least, for example..

[fletchowns]

It's called FXP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol

FlashFXP was a popular client that supported this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashFXP

[xorcist]

It's called fxp and you can still find information on it. In the top site scene it was widely used.