[CentOS] Two ftp clients? Why?

Wed Aug 3 16:11:06 UTC 2011
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 8/3/2011 10:41 AM, Brian Mathis wrote:
>
>>> having grown-up on computers before M$ existed, I still find FTP very
>>> easy, quick and efficient.
>>
>> Neither rsync nor http have anything to do with M$, they are just well designed
>> protocols.  Rysnc is specialized for copying files and directory trees, is
>> normally used over ssh, and doesn't need any extra server-side setup other than
>> ssh keys if you want it to work without passwords.  Http is very general and the
>> setup can be as simple or complicated as you want - and it is well understood by
>> firewalls and proxies.
>
>
> Rsync barely works well on Windows

So what does???

>, and certainly not without some
> sort of Cygwin involved.

Cygwin is 'just a .dll' as far as windows is concerned.  I think you can 
find bundled versions of just the rsync, ssh, and sshd executables with 
the cygwin dll, maybe even wrapped in a windows installer if you have 
something against the full cygwin setup.

> It works fine if you have a few files in a
> folder, but once you start dealing with directory trees, you run into
> many issues with folder redirections, loops, and junction points.

There are people using it for backups in combination with backuppc. 
They seem to think it works better than native windows file shares with 
smbtar which is the 'serverless' option.

Are you saying that ftp knows anything about the possible weirdness of 
junction points in NTFS?


> As for not needing extra server-side setup, you're talking about
> Windows here, which most definitely *does* need server-side setup for
> both ssh and rsync.  It does not "just work" at all.  Once again,
> you're talking about Cygwin, which is great but not exactly easy to
> deal with nor something standard.

I have too much history with frequent compromises of windows ftp back in 
NT and w2k days in spite of best security practices to ever consider 
running it on a public facing system again, but maybe things are better 
now...

For internal use, smbclient is OK for an occasional file copy, or using 
a UNC path for windows->windows.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com