On 7/5/24 04:42, Rob Wilton (rwilton) wrote:
Well, the real problem, of course, is NAT. A lot of NATs broke FTP in the first place especially for clients for which passive mode wasn't the default, and sometimes the NAT did a poor job of hacking the FTP protocol stream. NATs probably did more to kill FTP than lack of encryption or good authentication or its baroque file model. And sure, scp is better in most cases, and it exists for many platforms, but it's not quite standardized and implementations aren't quite uniform... and NATs break scp too.Normally, if I want to share a file with someone, I would encrypt it (if necessary) and share it via an online cloud storage provider or scp if in a Linux environment. I can’t see how this is harder than setting up an FTP server and ensuring that the recipient can find an ftp client, or how FTP could be deemed to be the most secure way of achieving this.
I still believe that for most users on the Internet, for the vast majority of cases, FTP is no longer the best answer for sharing files. This is why I believe that IETF making it historic would arguably be the right thing to do. I think that I probably stopped using it about 10+ years ago and haven’t missed it.
I do agree to the point about sharing files over various HTTP based services being bespoke. Perhaps someone should plan a BOF to do an FTP++ (whatever that looks like) to try and bring file sharing in to the 21st century and have a common solution?
I'd like that, but I suspect any solution that doesn't work
reliably in the presence of NATs and firewalls and other
middleboxes is doomed to failure. And probably that protocol
also needs to be able to recognize and respect locally-imposed,
and potentially fine-grained, administrative prohibitions on file
transfers.
Keith
