Comment by moontear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moontear | Hacker News Reader

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Hmm, the rant is just that - a rant. No solutions and many non-arguments such as outdated acronyms in the RFC.

I am with you that there are other solutions, but they are not easy to use for enterprise customers and that is where FTP still thrives. Rsync? Sysadmins maybe know this, but your marketing guy? BitTorrent? That's for illegal stuff and it is blocked on our company network.

You want to send a client (e.g. a newspaper) all your fancy videos and graphics (remember you are the marketing guy) to publish somewhere. The videos are of course 4GB per file.

What is the easiest way to share these files you have sitting in your "Marketing Campaign 2016" folder? Ask your IT department (just going by your suggestions): - HTTP? Our server cannot handle file transfers larger than 2GB and times out after that. Also most clients don't have resuming capabilities. And don't even start with public file sharers our data is private. - BitTorrent? Is blocked on our network. Also the client told us it is blocked by their ISP - rsync? What is that? I'm a windows guy. Also I doubt that the newspaper will know what to do with some weird command line commands...

Just set up a quick FTP server (or use the existing one) and send the link to the client. Everything works. Resuming. Large downloads. Easy to use. Reliable. "Known" interface as the client just sees folders and files. Many clients available or just the web browser.

I am not surprised at all that FTP is not dying, I myself have often advised customers to "just use FTP" instead of whipping up a custom solution. It just works. The cost is low, the benefit high.

Sadly there currently is no run of the mill solution to replace FTP that "just works" for the average joe.

You're transferring private data over an unencrypted protocol that sends passwords in plaintext?

SFTP does everything FTP does, works in every FTP client I've seen this decade, and is even supported by some FTP servers if you need virtual users.

Virtually every current FTP client also supports FTPS, so security is good enough.

Meanwhile, SFTP does not work with browsers and file managers (unlike FTP[S]), so FTPS works "out of the box" unlike SFTP.

As far as I know the web browser can't resume FTP downloads, and if you're going to install a dedicated downloader anyway, you might as well get one that supports HTTP.

And if you can install an FTP server, you can probably drop Mongoose[1] into the directory that has the files (it's a single binary) and double-click it. There are no more steps, it's already serving those files on port 8080.

[1] https://www.cesanta.com/developer/binary

"HTTP? Our server cannot handle file transfers larger than 2GB and times out after that." - So, the argument against a fundamentally broken protocol is that your instance of an implementation of some other protocol is broken? That's not a very strong argument.

As for "FTP just works" - the same way IE6 used to "just work": there are a lot of hacks happening under the hood, along the whole network path, to keep FTP from breaking (don't get me started on FTP and firewalls).

Command line? You mean "press Win, type cmd, Enter, type ftp, Enter." Right? Are you saying there are GUI tools to do that? This changes EEEVERYTHING! (What makes you think FTP is the only protocol with GUI tools? Is it 2000 yet?)

In other words, user-friendly solutions exist. But (and this is the elephant in the room) they are not quite as convenient for your local IT guy as shrugging it off with "just dump it on this unsecured clunker like it's 1995".

You caught the elephant. FTP is established and people know how to use it. And yes, kind of like IE6. I'm not saying that I personally wouldn't want something different (I do), but I know of nothing else as established I can easily give to IT departments. Command line I was referring to rsync. Try to explain all those cryptic arguments to some IT guys or worse a marketing department.

The world changes slow in some areas, especially slow in the enterprise world. That is the world FTP thrives (plus your average joe we hosted).

Well, I give them a preconfigured executable: the window looks similar to Explorer, and there's the remote server's content, and it asks for password at startup - but it's actually WinSCP with pubkey auth. Compressed, resumable, recursive, and reasonably secure (audit ahoy!).

Mac has SFTP support built in, as does Linux - no issues there.

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