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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

And can't go away soon enough.

Not NAT friendy. Needs special workarounds on firewalls. Not IPv6 friendly. Sends everything in the clear. No compression support. Different binary and text transfer modes. All the "fixes" to it are hacks that cause interoperability issues.

FTP is the fax machine of the internet. People still use it, but anyone with a clue hates it.

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It will eventually go away. Get hosting these days, such as cloud, they give you ftp over ssh and not traditional ftp (port 21). That's how it will fade.

I do love FTP though. But then again, I love holding a floppy in my hand too. It feels like you're holding real data.

SFTP is not FTP over SSH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSH_File_Transfer_Protocol

FTP was merely the first demonstration of how defective and nearly useless a network connection becomes when subject to NAT. It was written for peers who are actually on the Internet; nobody expected users to consent to being treated as lower forms of life.

It is not just NATing that breaks FTP but any form of firewall in general. Iptables isn't bad because there are special kernel modules that watch ftp traffic and auto adjust rules for you.

But good luck if your firewall is not on the same box as your FTP server.

I cannot agree with you more. I have 2 vendors that use FTP or FTP over SSH (not sftp) to upload data to our site. It is a firewall nightmare. Never mind the outbound ftp.

Not to mention that it's most likely slower than the identical HTTP file transfer.

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