Re: O.T. FTP upload
On Tue, 1 Nov 2011, Daniel Pitts wrote:
On 11/1/11 7:07 AM, Roedy Green wrote:
There are hundreds of FTP utilities. What do you use for FTP unattended
uploads?
My ISP is still waiting for a round TUIT to set up a VPN to replace
FTP.
I use sftp or scp.
I use rsync or Mercurial. Why transfer all those bytes which haven't
changed?
We are lucky, though, to be working with hosts that support modern,
efficient, reliable protocols like those. There are plenty of poor souls
out there who don't have access to anything more sophisticated than FTP.
Of course, our privilege means that we have no idea what the best tools
for that are!
Roedy, you mention that your ISP is going to set up a VPN. That seems like
overkill. Have you discussed rsync, running over SSH, as an option? It's
simple for users, simple for administrators, very widely used, secure,
flexible, and extremely efficient.
On a unix machine, rsync will be available from the package manager. The
administrators will need to set up system accounts for every user, but
they would normally do that anyway for FTP, i think, and they can restrict
them to use for rsync using scripts included in the rsync distribution.
A quick look suggests your ISP may be using Netware (although i find this
slightly hard to believe!), in which case they might be interested in:
http://wiki.novell.com/index.php/RSYNC
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/trench/470.html
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/appnote/654.html
(and many other writeups)
Also, never underestimate the bandwidth of a pickup truck full of
physical media.
Particularly when fired from a GIANT CANNON. It's not clear that the ISP
would support this, though, in ballistic mode or not.
tom
--
Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of
indirection. -- David Wheeler