FTP Is 40 Years Old 253
An anonymous reader writes "FTP celebrates its 40th birthday tomorrow. Originally launched as the RFC 114 specification, which was published on 16 April 1971, FTP is arguably even more important today than when it was born. Frank Kenney, vice president of global strategy for US managed file transfer company Ipswitch, said that the protocol we know as FTP today is 'a far cry from when Abhay Bushan, a student at MIT, wrote the original specifications for FTP.' According to Kenney, the standard has grown from 'a simple protocol to copy files over a TCP-based network [to] a sophisticated, integrated model that provides control, visibility, compliance and security in a variety of environments, including the cloud.'"
Re:Oh please (Score:4, Informative)
FTP is evil for simple firewalls but most advanced firewalls can rewrite the control commands or read them to open the right ports.
SFTP is something totally different, but since it uses a tunnel it isn't that bad for firewalls.
FTPS is the a nightmare! It has the random port problems of FTP but also encrypts the commands so there is no way for the firewall to figure out what ports will be used.
Kenny Should Learn History (Score:4, Informative)
According to Kenney, the standard has grown from 'a simple protocol to copy files over a TCP-based network [to] a sophisticated, integrated model that provides control, visibility, compliance and security in a variety of environments, including the cloud.
Actually, FTP predates TCP by 10 years and 679 RFCs. Hint: TCP is defined in RFC 793.
Re:Kenny Should Learn History (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Informative)
that the grand FTP sites like Walnut Creek didn't last this long. RIP cdrom.com, RIP gamehead, RIP happypuppy, RIP filefactory, RIP gamesdomain, and RIP sunet.se
n00b.
RIP wsmr-simtel20.army.mil
Re:Oh please (Score:5, Informative)
no command line HTTP file transfer clients ever sprang up
Let me introduce you to wget [gnu.org] and curl [curl.haxx.se].
Re:mod parent up (Score:4, Informative)
I agree (though if you are going to consider sftp, please also consider ftps), but it has been surprisingly durable. Rivals, historically, have included fsp, scp, rsync, uucp, WAIS, gopher and ftpmail. Some, like WAIS and gopher, also provided a far superior interface to the traditional FTP client.
Of these, scp and rsync are the only ones still in use today and I don't know of any anonymous FTP sites that provides scp, though I think kernel.org provides rsync.
About the only significant change to FTP since it began was that people used to use archie to find programs. (Archie, for those too young to remember, was a search engine specifically for anonymous FTP sites. You gave it a regexp, it gave you every site that had files that matched and the full directory path of those files. Because it was specialized, there was no risk of clutter. Equally, there was no chance it would survive into the era of web crawlers and generalized search engines.
The wrong FTP (Score:2, Informative)
The FTP we know today originated in RFC 765, published June 1980, and was designed to work over TCP. RFC 114 defines a completely different protocol for file transfer that has nothing to do with FTP.
Re:Nothing against FTP, (Score:5, Informative)
SFTP [wikipedia.org] has nothing to do with FTP, nor is it a wrapper. It is based on SSH, not FTP.
The three "generations" of FTP (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a little more background on the various generations of the FTP protocol.
First Generation (1971-1980)
The original specification for FTP (RFC 114) was published in 1971 by Abhay Bhushan of MIT. This standard introduced down many concepts and conventions that survive to this day including: ASCII vs. "binary" transfers, Username authentication (passwords were "elaborate" and "not suggested" at this stage) , "Retrieve", "Store", "Append", "Delete" and "Rename" commands, Partial and resumable file transfer , A protocol "designed to be extendable", Two separate channels: one for "control information", the other for "data", and Unresolved character translation and blocking factor issues
Second Generation (1980-1997)
The second generation of FTP (RFC 765) was rolled out in 1980 by Jon Postel of ITI. This standard retired RFC 114 and introduced more concepts and conventions that survive to this day, including: A formal architecture for separate client/server functions and two separate channels, Site-to-site transfers, Passive (a.k.a. "firewall friendly") transfer mode and The 3-digits-followed-by-text command response convention. ...and RFC 765 was replaced by RFC 959 (which formalized directory navigation) in 1985.
Third Generation (1997-current)
The third and current generation of FTP was a reaction to two technologies that RFC 959 did not address: SSL/TLS and IPv6.
Most FTP software now conforms to RFC 2228 for FTPS. Oddly enough, there are still a LOT of file transfer packages that still don't have IPv6 or EPSV support. The RFCs beyond IPv6 and EPSV support are pretty well baked, so if you're still dealing with a vendor without those attributes, consider that a big red flag.
Also keep an eye on draft-ietf-ftpext2-hash and draft-peterson-streamlined-ftp-command-extensions - that's where the action is in FTP today.