Re: We don't really need two FTP daemons

Buki <dev_at_null.cz> writes:
> Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des_at_des.no> writes:
> > "Julian H. Stacey" <jhs_at_tower.berklix.net> writes:
> > > I've never been sure which ftpd to run on my gateway (with IPFW, with no NAT)
> > > to provide proxy, so internal hosts could cd /usr/ports; make fetch
> > You don't need a proxy.  Do the following on each internal host:
> >
> > # echo 'FTP_PASSIVE_MODE=YES' >>/etc/profile
> actually, if the internal hosts use RFC1918 addresses this wouldn't
> suffice. He really needs either ftp proxy (and redirect all ftp traffic
> to it) or NAT.

He specifically said "no NAT", so I assumed his internal hosts had
routable addresses.  If they don't, he should set up Squid and define
FTP_PROXY and HTTP_PROXY in the internal hosts' environments; see
fetch(3) for details.  Better yet, define ftp_proxy and http_proxy as
some third-party software (wget, w3m) obey the lower-case variables but
not the upper-case ones.

OpenBSD has transparent FTP and TFTP proxies written specifically for
use with pf(4), but we haven't imported them (yet).

As for non-transparent FTP proxies, there are several unformalized and
mostly undocumented protocols.  The most common one seems to be to send
the server name as part of the login name (user_at_server:port) when
logging on to the proxy; libfetch supports that protocol and will use it
if the method part of FTP_PROXY (or ftp_proxy) is either "ftp" or
unspecified.  One open source proxy I know of which supports this is
ftp/ftpproxy in ports.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des_at_des.no