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.'"
Oh please (Score:5, Interesting)
FTP is a hideous protocol. The client connects to the server with one TCP connection, and then when a file (or directory listing) is requested, the server opens up another TCP connection back to the client. This is a nightmare for firewalls. There is also passive mode where the client initiates the second connection to the server, but it is only slightly less hideous.
As awful as HTTP is, it is infinitely better than FTP. Sadly HTTP is mostly one way, but these days for anything that isn't being broadcast to the public (the web), you are betterm off using ssh/scp.
Let FTP die already.
Exactly one advantage to FTP - FXP (Score:5, Interesting)
The only nonsucky thing about FTP is that you can use FXP [wikipedia.org] to transfer files between two remote servers without piping it through your client. For example, suppose you have FTP logins on two servers and each has a nice, fast Internet connection. You are on dialup and need to copy database backups from one server to the other. You can use FTP to tell the first to upload to the second's IP address, and tell the second to recv a file from the first's IP address. Nothing but the status messages go through your poor local modem.
You can do the same with by ssh'ing to the first server and scp'ing a file from it to the second, but that requires generating keypairs and copying the public keys around. If you're nitpicky about having separate keypairs on each SSH client machines (and you really should be!), and you have 20 hosts, then you'd have to copy 19 public keys to each machine. With FTP+FXP, you need an FTP login on each of the hosts. That's especially nice if the sending server is a public repository where you don't have anything but anonymous FTP access.
This isn't exactly a killer feature for most people, but it's kind of slick if you ever actually need it.