[X4U] Good easy to use cross platform FTP client

[David Ledger]

At 12:22 -0600 24/9/13, Doug McNutt wrote:
>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.

My previous ISP just gave you a fixed IP. My current one does for a 
one-off payment of £6. Most people I hear about get the same IP for 
months, some find it only changes if their modem disconnects for some 
reason. There's often a long subdomain name that the ISP maintains 
for you. Generally not a problem in the UK, but it may be elsewhere.

>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.

True. The more secure you want to be, the more work you have to do. 
If you're not too worried and Remote Login will only be available by 
arrangement then you can take some shortcuts. If your router can be 
set up to only allow incoming ssh from a single or range of IPs then 
you can use that to give security as well.

>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.

In my opinion OS X peaked at around Panther. Ever since then it's 
been getting further from user control. For me, Lion is too much of a 
downgrade. As my Macs die I expect to be moving to Linux.

My experience of Putty is really limited to using it to connect to a 
client's Unix boxes from a client supplied Windows box and opening 
xterms and the like back onto the PC. I've done a bit more, but 
insufficiently often to really remember it. At one client their 
firewall meant that we had to jump through hoops to get things like 
Unix diagnostic reports back to the PC for emailing to the 
manufacturer. I could, however, scp them from a secured Unix box to 
my Mac at home and then get them to the PC from there.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk