[ih] FTP RIP

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 29-Sep-20 03:25, wfms--- via Internet-history wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Sep 2020, Toerless Eckert via Internet-history wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 10:22:15PM -0400, John Day via Internet-history wrote:
>>> The control connection was a Telnet connection and assumed to be ASCII. The purpose was so that commands did not get blocked behind data. Also, for TIPS, the user FTP process was you. You typed the commands.
>>
>> Indeed. I remember doing this. Especially given how FTP supports third party transfers where
>> an operator on host A can initiate ftp transfers directly between hosts B and C. Forgot the
>> CLI commands though...
>>
>> Pretty fundamental functionality that AFAIK are missing from other protocols after FTP.
>>
>> I have not followed later development of secure ftp options, but i would be (positively) surprised
>> if there where cryptographic variants whereby you could set up a cryptographic B<->C connection
>> only using A's credentials on B and A's credentials on C.
> 
> IIRC, I think the GLOBUS GridFTP extensions do something like this, maybe 
> not via crypto on the data transfer side.  A description of the extensions 
> are here:
> 
> https://www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.20.pdf
> 
> Haven't followed to see if they ever went to IETF.  

The grid people took an explicit decision *not* to pursue an RFC for GridFTP, sometime before July 2005. So it never received any IETF review, despite being effectively a set of extensions to FTP. (I was the IETF's liaison to the Global Grid Forum until March 2005, and I tried numerous times to get GridFTP discussed in the IETF Apps Area, but it never happened.)

I don't know to what extent GridFTP is still used. Since the Globus toolkit is on its way out, so is GridFTP. A main user has been the Worldwide LHC Computational Grid, but they are looking for alternatives: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.03490

That's an interesting paper if Terabytes/hour is a metric that fits your application.

   Brian Carpenter

> An overview can be 
> found here:
> 
> https://www.mcs.anl.gov/~mlink/tutorials/GridFTPTutorialSlides.pdf
> 
> wfms
>