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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what could have been done to make a new FTP that was better than SFTP. FTP had a couple of edge cases that were very nifty (like connect to server 1; connect to server 2; tell server 2 to listen; tell server 1 to send to server 2's port; voila, transfer from server1 to server 2 without ever transferring the data to your own host!) but I don't know that anyone ever actually used them.

SFTP came along as basically a working, feature-complete replacement. Once it became production-ready, I don't think there was anywhere for FTP to go.

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Cross-sending is called FXP in video and is(was?) used extensively by all broadcasters, TV channels, etc. So much that it's a must-have functionality for any storage system in this domain.

Given SFTP is ssh based, it seems like it could support agent forwarding + an FXP-like mechanism to jump from server to Server w/o transferring to the controlling host ...

I remember it more from the times when illegal releases were raced to ftp servers to be downloaded by everybody, pre torrent.

> I'm not sure what could have been done to make a new FTP that was better than SFTP.

Or HTTPS, IMO; it supports file download/upload, user/pass access control, and encryption. It's a little annoying to have HTTP subsume yet another thing, but it's actually pretty decent at this one.

The problem with HTTP is that it’s too generic to be a drop-in replacement. You have to get people to agree on a single app/protocol that uses HTTP as transport.

That’s what WebDAV was for.

> SFTP came along as basically a working, feature-complete replacement

The FTP standard has a number of features that SFTP doesn't include, such as record-oriented file transfer (STRU R, MODE B), store-unique (STOU – you upload the file, the server picks the name instead of the client). Many of these features are rarely used, and many clients/servers don't even implement them, but SFTP is not a feature-complete replacement for FTP. But there are some environments (e.g. mainframe environments) where these features are used, and these feature gaps make it difficult or impossible to replace FTP with SFTP

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