Begone, vile daemon!
I’ve been looking forward to the death of FTP for a long time. As has, I imagine, anyone who ever needed to configure a firewall to allow it. And, thanks to its password-in-the-clear design, it’s often the case that users who can ssh into a server are also given a second, restricted, login specifically for file uploads.
There are SSL enabled FTP daemons out there, although I confess I’ve never used them. My champion was always going to come from ssh – the app that slew telnet.
Using vanilla scp as an ftp replacement has always been a bit problematic,
missing critical things like resume operations; hence SFTP, not a new daemon but a subsystem for performing ftp-like operations over an ssh session (see also skermit).
But every time I tried to get rid of ftpd, Windows users would complain
about not having an SFTP client. Of course, there’s been an SFTP client available with PuTTY for a while, but the command-line interfaces tend to put off everyone but the unixbeards. ssh.com has offered a commercial
GUI SFTP client for years now, but whenever I’ve looked into the few free offerings out there, I’ve been disappointed.
Well, no longer. WinSCP 3.0beta is out – now with SFTP support, and easy to recommend. It’s fully drag-and-droppable, features and Explorer or Norton Commander style interfaces and can also add itself to the “Send To” Explorer menu. A little indication of what it would be like if SFTP support was built into Windows. Which one day, Bob-willing, it will be.
So I’m uninstalling ftpd – and it won’t be returning. Normal users can upload with SFTP, and FTP-only accounts will become rssh accounts.
OSX users can get Fugu (poison. poison. poison. tasty fish!)
Maybe in the future you’ll be able to sit down at any Windows box and type something like sftp://user@server.example.com/documents/
into an Explorer address bar and it’ll just work. On that day, my friend, FTP will be as dead as a gopher.
