Re: FTP, mostly questions, but a patch, too.

On Thu, 26 May 2005, Warren Brown wrote:

> Hugh,
>
>> I was looking at RFC959 -- the FTP spec,
>> So, the other thing it says about modes is that RETRy won't
>
>    First of all, note that FTP is a very "loose" protocol with lots of
> nonstandard but widely-used extensions.  Although RFC959 is the base for
> the FTP protocol, many other RFCs should also be considered.  Some of
> the main ones are: RFC1123, RFC1579, RFC2228, RFC2389, RFC2428, RFC2640,
> as well as several IETF drafts.

OK, I'll have a look, but what I saw about those (on rfc-editor.org)
didn't suggest extensions for compression which I was concerned with
at the time
>
>    As far as the RETR command, you have misread RFC959.  RETR is the
> "RETRieve" command.  It is the command issued when you "GET" a file.
> What you are describing is the REST ("RESTart") command.

Yes, you're quite right, I'm glad you read what I meant rather than
thwat I wrote :-) :-)
>
>   In practice, virtually nobody uses anything but stream mode for FTP
> communications, and currently one of the major problems with FTP
> communications is the lack of a restart command that works with stream
> mode.  This is addressed by IETF draft "Extensions to FTP", which

I've had some success RESTarting wih wget for ftp sessions, so it
may be that enough servers do this to be useful.

> extends the REST command to include stream mode, but not very many FTP
> clients or servers currently support this.  That same draft is also
> trying to standardize the widely-used MDTM ("MoDification TiMe") command
> that you ran across.  The EPRT ("Extended PoRT") command is the IPv6
> version of the PORT command and is described by RFC2428.
>
>    I hope this helps.

Yes it does. maybe I should resubmit that patch with more comments.

I think supporting the other modes would be worth a go, though I
don't know in practice how much run length encoding would save: much
that people want to download is already zipped. For uploads of EXE
files it could be useful, which is what lead me in this direction
>
>    - Warren Brown
>
>
         Thank you,
         Hugh
>
>