Paulo Licio de Geus says:
> "Bob Cunningham" writes:
> > There may be benign uses of fsp, but personally I've not seen it used
> > EXCEPT by crackers. It appears to be their tool of choice for
> > transferring file in a relatively untraceable manner.
> >
> > One person who has "visited" some of the systems around here has about
> > 12MBytes of compressed tar files containing virtually all the cracking
> > tools you could imagine (and more) that he transfers all around using fsp.
>
> Correction. We live on a very low speed link to the rest of the
> world, where ftp usually never finishes for anything >500KBytes. In
> that situation FSP is the only thing that allows us to transfer data
> when anyone else would just do ftp. There are very few sites
> supporting the protocol, but these sometimes saves your day.
> Facts: this country relies on two 64Kbits/s links to the rest of the
> world, and this place is connected to the main country backbone
> through a combo of 9.6+4.8 kbits/s. And, surprise, we maintain
> everything here up to date.
This sounds dubious. FSP doesn't do proper backoff on a link because
it uses udp, so its probably far worse for a slow unreliable link than
FTP. Furthermore, you can get FTP clients that will properly restart
aborted transfers where you left off -- its all part of the FTP
protocol. Furthermore, even if the line is slow, FTP shouldn't be
dropping things -- I suspect you have a buggy system if it is.
Everything should just transfer very slowly, thats all -- in practice
the line shouldn't be going down. Seems to me that using FSP can only
make things worse, not better, by clogging the line.
Perry Metzger
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