Given the inherent security issues with ftp, especially the fact that passwords are sent in plain text over the network, ICT have decided to block external ftp into College and hence we have withdrawn the ftp service provided by CSG.

There are however two secure equivalents that you can use:

• Secure ftp (SFTP) is a secure version of ftp, and we are, or will be, running SFTP on all the shell servers shell1.doc.ic.ac.uk, shell2.doc.ic.ac.uk, shell3.doc.ic.ac.uk and shell4.doc.ic.ac.uk.

• Secure copy (SCP) is a secure version of the old rcp (remote copy) program. With a suitable SCP client, you can retrieve or send files from/to any DoC Linux machine, such as those mentioned above.

Which Client Programs should you use under Windows?

SSH Corp, the original designers of the SSH protocol, have a graphical SFTP client bundled with their SSH client which is freely available for academic or personal use. A number of users have reported that they prefer this client to the other graphical ones listed below.

Putty includes command-line clients for secure copying of files via both scp and SFTP. For more details see the Putty Homepage. In particular the files PSCP and PSFTP will be of interest.

SecEx Lite is a graphical interface to SFTP and SCP. It is available from the ByteFusion website.

WinSCP is a graphical interface to the SCP command. It is available from the WinSCP homepage. Some people have found this slow, and having a tendency to lose the connection.

Which Client Programs should you use under Linux?

scp is the secure copy command in Linux. For example:

% scp username@shell1.doc.ic.ac.uk:file_in_home_directory local_filename

sftp is the secure ftp client for Linux.

The basic idea is that you sftp sftp.doc.ic.ac.uk, authenticate yourself in any ssh-type way, and then use ftp-style get and put commands to transfer files. Note that SFTP is always in binary mode, and doesn't understand the old 'hash' command to print hash marks while transferring. Otherwise, it's much the same as ftp used to be.

Finally, recent versions of Konqueror, part of the KDE desktop suite, support connecting to SFTP servers. Simply type in the URL:

sftp://username@sftp.doc.ic.ac.uk/

Which Client Program should you use from a Mac?

© CSG / 2005