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A Better FTP?

Posted by Cliff on from the we-can-rebuild-it-we-have-the-technology dept.

cppgodjavademigod asks: "I used to work for a company that sold a file transfer product for datacenters. It supported checkpoint/restart, encyrpted password transmition, asynchonous job procesing, etc. Is there an Open Source project that aims to provide a better FTP? I'm looking for something that makes use of multiple paths (for machines connected via more than one network), job restart, job control, secure transmission (over internet), maybe even tunneling over HTTP and redundant servers (via some kind of private P2P protocol)."

6 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Swarmcast? by RossyB · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sounds a lot like Swarmcast to me...

  2. FSP, anyone? by Chelloveck · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Remember FSP, the "File Server Protocol". It was introduced about 10 years ago and was supposed to be the FTP-killer. Technically it probably was superior, but good ol' FTP was available everywhere and was good enough. Today you'd be hard-pressed to find any FSP sites at all. The last published version of the FSP FAQ appears to be dated 1996-08-19. It seems there's really no demand for a better FTP.

    --
    Chelloveck
    I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
  3. Grid computing pushing this issue by rw2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I work in grid computing and we have some needs that push this idea forward. Over at Argonne labs the Globus team has put forward this draft of extensions for some of what you talk about (i.e. it's secure and multi-path). Code exists under yet another open source license the "Globus Toolkit Public License".

  4. SFTP by Anthanos · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How about SFTP? It is an FTP like protocol layered ontop of SSH. While it may not have ALL the features you were looking for, it has the most important - security.

    --
    pGina, http://www.xpasystems.com - Making the big boys play nice.
  5. Bittorrent by rafa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    bittorrent has some of what you're looking for. It automaticaally mirrors when you download, helping ease the load on the server for poular downloads. Worth checking out. It could probably be run over ipsec if you wanted to.

    --
    [Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
  6. Content-Addressable Web by Orasis · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Hello, I am the creator of Swarmcast and have just written a new paper entitled "HTTP Extensions for the Content-Addressable Web" that is available at onionnetworks.com.

    The Content-Addressable Web provides all of the asked-for features, including multi-source/parallel downloads, and the ability to safely retrieve content from untrusted mirrors.

    Please read the paper and tell me what you think.