[X4U] Good easy to use cross platform FTP client

[Doug McNutt]

At 10:57 +0100 9/24/13, David Ledger wrote:
>
>One option is to give them an account on your Mac, turn on Remote Login in Sharing Preferences, and set your router to send SSH requests to your Mac. They can then use an FTP-alike application that can do 'scp' (copy over ssh) and grab it directly. It would be worth them checking with an ssh login first using 'putty' or similar to get the ssh keys sorted out.


Absolutely!.  I have been doing that for several years and it never fails. There are some problems though that require some study in order to make it work.

1) You have to know your IP address and the address for the distant target machine. That wouldn't be hard except for the attitude of companies that provide connectivity. They can and do deliberately change your IP address periodically just to keep you from running your own web site. There are ways to test for changes and post the changed value on, say, your own web site. You can also register, and pay for, a fixed IP address.  Either way some cash is required. <http://WhatsMyIP.com>, or something like that, will help.

2) You just have to worry about maintaining a $HOME/,ssh/ directory. That means you must not be afraid of Terminal.app and a shell with which you can prepare and maintain files that must be there.  They have names like known_hosts, authorized_keys, id_rsa,  and id_rsa.pub. They are where public and private cryptographic keys are stored along with remote hosts which are allowed. ssh will require that permissions for that directory allow access only by the user.

3) ssh can work using passwords but it is far less secure than connections with public and private keys which users need to understand and create for themselves. It's a whole lot more effort and just will never be as simple as https which uses parts of ssh. Even the bankers won't allow browser-less connections using ssh probably because they can't figure out how to explain the usage to their customers. Shhh  --  there is some mathematics involved.

I have never been able to share my work or other files using ssh with anyone not comfortable with UNIX or Linux. Apple doesn't really like those parts of the BSD UNIX it chose as an underlayment for OS X. Have you noticed that Finder's Connect to Server by FTP will allow you to download but simply doesn't allow the other direction?  There is no way to Connect to Server using ssh or its scp protocols. Why not???  And that reference to putty  pretty much makes the same case.  Putty is put_tty where the tty is a teletypewriter from long ago. Bash and csh are more recent shells.

-- 
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry.