On 08/02/11 8:32 PM, Always Learning wrote: > having grown-up on computers before M$ existed, I still find FTP very > easy, quick and efficient. the FTP protocol has 2 fundamental problems. first, its a plaintext protocol that uses plaintext user/password authentication, and secondly, it creates dynamic sockets on the fly for file transfer, which makes tunneling it through firewalls problematic. Further, there's two different methods of socket creation, each of which requires special case handling in firewalls at either the client or server side, and this method is chosen by the client, the server has no choice but to support what the client requests, these two modes are known as passive and active.. if you have to use ftp to transfer files, for instance with legacy embedded systems, and you're scripting this, check out lftp, its far more script friendly than the old legacy FTP client. me, I use scp/sftp for authenticated remote file transfers over the internet, and mostly use NFS for internal lan transfers. rsync is useful for incremental updates of a large set of files. for anonymous file serving, I prefer to use http rather than FTP, its just as fast at the raw transfer, and its stateless, so there's less overhead on the server. as an example of lftp, this is my cron job for updating my internal centos mirror /usr/bin/lftp -c 'open ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/pub/ && lcd /export/mirror && \ mirror -c -x ia64 -x s390 -x s390x -x alpha -x SRPMS centos' (note, I'm not mirroring itanium, system/390, or alpha, nor the SRPMs. My local mirror is in /export/mirror/centos on that system, which is available via both NFS and http on my local network...). -- john r pierce N 37, W 122 santa cruz ca mid-left coast _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos