Re: Distros

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 08:23:48PM +0000, mike808@users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> After all, John Postel called it the File Transfer Protocol for some reason.

Have you ever actually implemented the protocol?  It's a crufty,
error-prone protocol that is positively hostile to firewalls.  The
only "protocol" that is worse that I am aware of is rsh/rlogin.

FTP should have been abandoned years ago.

Honestly though, I only see two realistic options for transfering
large files.  (Maybe three, depending on how you count.)  One is
rsync, which is useful for all the things FTP used to be useful for,
such as anonymous transfers and almost-anonymous transfers (where you
need to have a password-protected directory, but not so badly that you
need encryption).  The other is ssh (with scp, sftp, or rsync), which
you would want to use for actual users.  (Even the Windows users can
handle sftp when given a GUI.)

To get this post somewhat back on topic, here's a little tip for those
of you not familiar with rsync.  You can get a list of modules
available on a rsync server with this:

    rsync -n rsync://ftp.luci.org/

Technically, if you leave off the local target, the -n isn't
necessary.

You can get a directory listing of a single directory by adding the
module and path to the rsync command above.  For example, to do the
equivalent of "ls /pub" in ftp, you'd use this:

    rsync -n rsync://ftp.luci.org/ftp/pub/

Just add -r to get a recursive directory listing.  (But please don't
do it in that directory.)

To download all of the Red Hat 8.0 ISO images to the current
directory, you'd want a command like this:

    rsync -avP rsync://ftp.luci.org/redhat/linux/8.0/en/iso/i386/. .

Adding "--exclude '*[45]*'" will exclude the two source-only CDs.

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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