GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 344961
gftp lacks a protocol extension and this prevents me from connecting to lots of ftp servers I wish to use.
Last modified: 2018-07-12 00:13:06 UTC
I like gftp very much, the user interface is very clean and functional. It supports fxp, and pretty much anything the normal ftp user would want. I am that .1% that uses weird ftp servers. There is a small protocol extension called "PRET" that is supported by lftp, pftp, jftpgw, slang-curl, pftpmew, LundFXP, and kftpgrabber.(pretty much all of the main windows ftp clients support PRET, but windows is poopoo so I won't mention those) This protocol extension allows me to connect to distributed ftp servers(drftpd or glftpd as two examples that are capable of these technologies.) from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drftpd #DrFTPD is a distributed FTP daemon written by Morgan Christiansson in java. It #is unique because it does not handle transfers like normal FTP servers. Instead #of conventional server ↔ client transfer, DrFTPD is set up with a master and a #collection of file transfer slaves that handle the file transfers, you can have #as many file transfer slaves as you like. Some names that could be used to #describe this is ftp site merger, ftp cluster, ftp grid or multi site bnc. # #What is unique with DrFTPD is that not only can it use master ↔ client for #control connections and slave ↔ client for (most) data transfers, but it works #with existing FTP software, you can use the FTP application you're used to and #make site-to-site (FXP) transfers with normal FTP servers. The only exception #is with passive (PASV) mode, for this the client needs to support the PRET #protocol extension. PRET is already supported in several of the most widely #used FTP applications. You can often do without PASV mode unless you are behind #a firewall which you don't have access to or you need to FXP with another #DrFTPD server or a server which doesn't support PASV. So basically you can add up ftp servers, agregately. So if I have 10 servers, with 100mbit pipes, and they each have 200 gigs. I would make them drftpd slaves, then I have a 2TB site, with 1gbit agregate bandwidth.(or at least this is how it appears) To the user, it just looks like a 2TB site, and if they use 10 threads to download, they can download at 1gbit a second(if capable). It's pretty cool stuff imho. But gftp doesn't support pret at the moment :( There are patches for other ftp clients that implemented PRET below: http://www.drftpd.org/index.php/Pftpmew_pret_patch http://www.drftpd.org/index.php/Pftp_pret_patch (also see forum: http://www.drftpd.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=86 ) I'm not a developer, so I don't know what exactly it entails to support PRET with gftp. But that drftpd developer says it's a "small protocol extension" and it's easy to patch. If it's too much trouble forget about it. I just thought I would put in this bug request. I have sites I can't connect to. Kind regards for taking the time to read my email, John
Currently the PRET command is still just a IETF draft: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dd-pret-00 However, it would be quite good to have some kind of testing environment. Do you have a test scenario available which I could use to do some tests when writing a patch?
gftp is not under active development anymore and has not seen code changes for many years. Its codebase has been archived: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/gftp/commits/master The maintainer states that "I would like to hand this project off to someone compotent" on https://www.gftp.org/ Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.