[geeks] RANT (ftp)

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2006 14:46:17 -0400 (EDT)
der Mouse <mouse at Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA> wrote:

> >>> What the hell happened to FTP?  [...]
> >> Getting FTP to work properly through firewalls is a black art.
> 
> Not really.  I've done it often enough, including in some rather
> unusual firewall situations (like a double-NAT situation).  Any case
> where someone finds making FTP to work through a firewall to be a
> black art is, I believe, one where that person does not really
> understand FTP, the firwall, or both.

It's also true that there are pre-written recipes for most of the
common firewalls to handle ftp.

Commercial firewalls often have ftp support as a configuration option
so you don't have to do the work yourself.

> > I don't know... I smell another agenda at work.
> 
> So do I.  My own suspicions mostly center on how FTP does not support
> pushing ads at the user; secondarily, how much more scriptable it is.

That would be my guess too, and really, it seems pretty obvious that is
the idea.

For example, look how many websites use annoying indirect links and
even multiple indirection for downloads.  There is *zero* reason for
them either for statistics or load balancing, even though those are the
two common excuses.

Even sites like sourceforge do crap like that.

The problem is that it makes it impossible to queue up a bunch of links
and download them in batches, which is how I prefer to do it.

Even if you use a downloader program that can figure out the
indirection and queue up the final link, a lot of the download URLs
expire very quickly, meaning you can't schedule them overnight or for
idle times.

Then there are the even worse sites that use queues and/or timers
before you can download.

The problem is that it forces you to sit there idle and babysit the
downloads one at a time.  That's a huge waste of time.

Back before the Internet got improved, it used to be so much faster...


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [governorrhea: a contagious disease that
spreads from the governor of a state downward through other offices and
his corporate sponsors]