On Mon, Jul 03, 2000 at 12:28:04PM +1000, Stephen Piuk wrote:
> how about a program that converts packets from FTP type to HTTP?
you mean ftp via an http proxy?
squid, etc do it already.
> as far as I know the difference between the protocols is that FTP
> has bigger packets so they are better for bigger transfers and HTTP
> has smaller so better for things like web pages where the download
> is smaller. (Binary packages like to use FTP cause they are bigger)
no. packet size (for TCP) depends on the mtu of wherever the tcp
connection has to go.
only if the server is written to send the data in too small chunks
(definately *not* the case for most web and ftp servers) will you get
smaller packets.
there are a few differences in the protocols, the main one being that
ftp has a separate connection for control signals, whereas http uses
the same connection for both. theoretically this makes ftp more
responsive during large downloads.
since the data is not encoded (although i suppose it can be under
http) in any way, the data transfer of the two are nearly identical.
(except that http often has caching proxies, which will help greatly
if you get a hit, but add a hop if you miss)
you can also use ftp for funky things like transfers between two
remote hosts, without having to log in to either
and ftp clients/servers are more likely to support continuation of
broken downloads
> you could get around the problem by passing the packet using some
> program or server to transfer the packet size in transit from A to B
> into a HTTP stream.
it would be a simple matter to make an ftp client cgi script. you'd
have to be careful where you ran it from tho, since they would be the
one paying for the bandwidth.
but you may as well just run a squid proxy somewhere and enable the
ftp options.
> As the server/program would be only changing packet size and not
> actually downloading it the server wouldn't be involved in massive
> costs (i.e. bandwidth or HD space)
how do you get the packets in order to "change their size" without
actually downloading them?
--
- Gus
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