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Who is Still Using FSP?
orangesquid asks: "So what on earth has happened to FSP, the original 'underground filesharing' system? I know it dried up a long time ago, but most old protocols still tend to have a few odd users (gopher, finger, etc.). However, I haven't found a single FSP site out there that still works. Googling is difficult, because all of the search hits are dated 1996 or earlier, and none of them are accurate. Is FSP still around at all? What are people using it for now?"
"chirp chirp"
And it's a good thing too. Contrary to what the FSP FAQ says, FTP is a better solution, especially with resume. But an even better protocol is SFTP. That's the future as P2P is about to be litigated out of existence.
Hello? Hello? Anyone there?
Please connect to my gopher server...
Hello?
You've probably caused a lot of people to Google, download and then use it.
Heisenberg would be proud.
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
mirror in case of slashdotting:
/Pub/Internet/Servers/FSP/
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[To Parent Directory]
11/14/96 2:51 PM 34910 FSP-faq.html
11/26/96 7:18 PM 4871 FSP-Sites.html
11/26/96 7:14 PM 4871 FSP-Sites.txt
11/14/96 2:33 PM 42171 ofspdb04.zip
11/14/96 2:39 PM 4095 OmniFSPdDocumentation.html
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The lightweight aspect is covered by a much better-known solution (datagrams and all) called TFTP.
::shrugs::
FTP servers have become much more tolerant, configurable, and featureful. Plus we have sftp and scp which make command-line coddling + security a reality.
Finally, if you want to keep directories updated between sites passively or sporadically, you can always use rsync, which uses less bandwidth by virtue than FSP right off the bat.
Where does FSP fit in? Nowhere, anymore. I don't feel nostalgic as I'd never even heard of it.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
GOO GOO GOO GOO ACK
My guess is that someone at Microsoft is waiting for people to forget about it so that they can re-introduce and patent the embraced, extended version for patch downloads.
:)
Now that you've brought it up, you've set their plans back by years, you bastard!
Seriously, I pulled out the FSP sources that I had a while ago, and they didn't even compile cleanly. (I think they worked on SunOS 3 or so). I decided that using rsync would work almost as well with a lot less work.
FSP has a future, but only for non-critical software transfers, and nobody's ever willing to admit that their transfer is non-critical. So, you really do need someone like an OS vendor to sneak it in behind-the-scenes. Maybe, uh, Redhat could use it for their patch transfer system.
Sick thought: BitTorrent over FSP. After you get over the nausea, it starts to sound like an okay idea.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
My former college has resorted to using DAV when they decided to disable FTP for security reasons.
They chose to use DAV instead of FTP for security reasons? That is a riot.
I thought people had long since forgotten about that protocol.
When it was popular (pffft, hardly) I was into "the scene"... I think people quickly realized that FTP was better. There was no point in FSP ever existing. It was almost as if someone tried to do what Zmodem did for Xmodem but failed because there was nothing wrong with FTP/HTTP in the first place and it provided no benefits.
Hell, even HTTP is better.
I used to use FSP. I even hacked the source to dramatically shorten the time delay it waits between sending requests for data, to get faster service :)
There were 2 main reasons to use FSP:
1) It used UDP, not TCP. Many monitoring/logging tools and firewalls back in the day only really had a tight control on TCP. Using UDP was a good way to slip under the wire.
2) It deliberately kept its data rate very small. Something on the order of 2K per second. Even with a hacked client, the server simply wouldn't send data any faster than a certain cutoff point, and ignored any requests that came in faster than that. This data rate throttling was done, again, to help stay under the radar. Many sites were detected only because a huge upward spike in consumed bandwidth was noticed. Using FSP, a site could stay up for a much longer period of time before being caught and deleted.
Nowadays, we all have great P2P applications to make good use of UDP, and bandwidth usage is usually adjustable on them, so the main reasons to use FSP have gone away. Good riddance, I say, as it was truly a terrible protocol (think of XMODEM over IP)!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Gopher Turtle?
Freshmeat Project
Back in the day, fsp was much better than ftp because it did not keep open connections per client, and used much less memory. This was very important when you had 100 request and only 8 meg of memory. Yes a server with 8 megs at one time was possible.
I like to build things and wire stuff together.
You waited three minutes before commenting that no one was responding? In an article that didn't make the front page? Isn't that a little premature? REmember, most of the First-Posting Karma Whores only pay attention to stories that make the front page. More mods read them.
sftp is little more than an additional layer ontop of ssh (much like scp, which is also file transfer through an ssh tunnel). It still comunicates ith ssl to to an ssh daemon.
...", and, bang, there you go: it's like "rsync mode for sftp".
Since you need to have ssh set up, anyways, you could try tunneling rsync through ssh. Just "rsync -e ssh
All told, though, I don't really know that this is the solution for safe file sharing, though. This is just a way to do file *transfer* well. At least as important a part of file sharing is being able to locate files. That's also where a lot of the danger to the file-sharer comes in: advertising which files he/she has to share.
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
fsp had very little effect on my other uses of the line, so I could have it downloading while I'm doing other stuff and not even notice. Other forms of file transfer would send my ping times up to about one second.
Alas, I finally got rid of it when I got my cable modem. I considered keeping it around, but it just wasn't needed.
Looks like I still have my log file around!
so that tells exactly how long it's been since I've used it. And I think I was one of the last onesHeisenberg was driving his car one day when he gets pulled over by a cop.
As the cop approaches, Heisenberg rolls down his window.
The cop says "Excuse me sir, do you know how fast you were going back there?"
Heisenberg says "No, but I know where I am."
Well, link it! I don't think I've ever seen a gopher server Slashdotted. Come on, it'll be fun!
which spawn several download processes to grab bandwidth from other sockets.
Maybe one of those "fast downloaders" patented the technique of using a specific amount of bandwidth?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.