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Comment by ganoushoreilly | Hacker News Reader

For me, I SFTP from 5 locations around the globe daily. I could build a complex system to manage the transfers.. but why, when it just works for our use case.

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SFTP is basically just SSH, the only thing it shares in common with FTP is the name.

perhaps op meant FTPS?

SSH is just the transport, you use a different protocol inside it. But yeah, it's not FTP

The only difference is the security transport / authentication, otherwise if functions the exact same way.

The original RFC for SFTP was written to actually be a simpler version of FTP. While v3 seems to be the standard and the final RFC was never ratified, SFTP is still FTP.

Please link to that RFC then.

They are very different. SFTP isn't even textual, nor does it have separate control and data channels of FTP.

Are these exactly the same?:

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc959.txt

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-moonesamy-secsh-...

Are you perhaps referring to FTPS, which is FTP with SSL/TLS added? SFTP is very, very different from FTP.

Note that SFTP is not a protocol for security transport / authentication. It doesn't do that. It assumes that you've already secured/authorized the channel with SSH. See section 1 of the RFC.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-secsh-filex...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTPS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSH_File_Transfer_Protocol

It's secure tunneled FTP. Functionally it performs the exact same way as ftp only it's not in clear text and you have better authentication options.

No, that's FTPS. FTPS wraps FTP in TLS; SFTP is a protocol in the SSH protocol that can transfer files and that happens to implement an FTP-like interface.

Unfortunately SFTP isn't a good replacement when speed is a concern, anything running over OpenSSH will have its bandwidth limited by the fixed window size. I long for the day when HPN-SSH replaces OpenSSH everywhere.

I just found out this is a thing. Thank you for this.

Adding to the thanks for sending me down a new fun rabbit hole

Most of our transfers are limited by our backbone, but because we chunk files we're able to do multiple concurrent transfers and max out traffic as best we can. We mostly have 10g links, but anything over that tends to get into serious diminishing returns in value/performance.

Mainly that the storage medium is not going to be able to usually keep up with the Link speed of 100gbps for long

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