[CentOS] Two ftp clients? Why?

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Wed Aug 3 12:57:27 UTC 2011


On 8/3/11 12:12 AM, 夜神 岩男 wrote:
> On 08/03/2011 06:41 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>
>> But back to the original problem, why would anyone use ftp in this
>> century when rsync or http(s) are so much easier to manage?
>
> Do we have Kerberized rsync yet? Or Globus rsync?
>
> If so... please post a link and... (^.^)

Rysnc only uses its own transport if you run it in daemon mode which is pretty 
rare.  Current versions run over ssh by default so if that already works with 
kerberos so will rsync.  Older versions used to run over rsh, so that would have 
used the version found in the same kerberos/bin/ directory as ftp.  Or you  can 
use the '-e ' option to control the transport shell.

> Anyway, that sort of gets to the heart of just why we have several (not
> just two) ftp options. ftp, vsftp, Kerberized ftp, gridftp, etc... Its a
> pretty common tool and in some specific cases scripting the niche ones
> is necessary due to a lack of alternatives to match a given environment
> -- though if security isn't an issue (bringing in signed, public
> packages from a repo, say)... then yeah, rsync; though some people view
> it as "just one more thing to have to learn" and never discovering the
> benefits.

It's easier to learn than the other options because the arguments are pretty 
much the same as cp with the option to add a remote user at host to the source or 
target.  It also works better than most of the other ways to copy because 
besides only moving the changed data on a repeated run, it creates the target 
file with a temp name and renames only when complete so if the files are being 
used, nothing will open/access partial files.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell at gmail.com





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