Re: SSH File Transfer Protocol - draft-moonesamy-secsh-filexfer-00

[Joseph Galbriath <[e-mail]>]

On 2013/07/13 6:56, Mouse wrote:
>> The SSH File Transfer Protocol provides secure file transfer
>> functionality over any reliable data stream.
>
> Well...it, combined with the rest of ssh, does; sftp itself doesn't
> provide any significant level of security, depending on lower layers
> for that.
>
> But, really, it provides a lot more than file transfer; it's really a
> remote filesystem access protocol, misnamed as a file transfer
> protocol.  If you really want a file transfer protocol, I'd suggest
> using a slight mutation of FTP (using ssh channels rather than TCP
> connections).  But, apparently, people prefer a remote filesystem
> access protocol, even a misnamed one.

Funny we should arrive here.  That was one of the things VanDyke was
considering in the time frame between SFTP advent as a product and
the publishing of the initial draft.  We may have even brought it up
in an ietf meeting.

 From a technical view point, this is still somewhat interesting to me;
one of the difficulties with SFTP (as speced from draft 0 onwards) is
the request/response nature of moving data. A protocol (like FTP) that
just said "send me the whole file as fast as you can" would probably
be a lot harder to mess up performance wise than SFTP, where it is
necessary to issue multiple overlapping read requests with carefully
tuned max-packet, read size, and channel window in order to get
reasonably good performance.

Thanks,

Joseph