Paul~enwiki

Annoyingly, it seems I'm about to lose the ID I've had since 2000-something. Ah well. I'm still Paul. Just not here.

Here I am Paul~enwiki :-/

Paul

The mysterious vanishing Paul. I thought I'd put myself back in with the name under which I edited what seems like ages ago, but probably wasn't. Now there's a sentence crying out for an edit.

There is half-digested text about ftp and its secure cousins at the bottom of the page...

• Somebody keeps requesting password resets for me - please stop it -Paul 11:02, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
• It's getting ridiculous - twice this week, for instance. The latest request from 64.236.245.243. Pick your own user ID, please! - Paul 20:44, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• And again - go away, children, please!

OK. The following attempts (for as far back as I have records) - let's see if there is a pattern:

• 202.156.6.54 at 2006-01-19 00:43 GMT (...cache.maxonline.com.sg)
• 64.236.245.243 at 2006-01-19 11:52 (...gate.timeinc.com)
• 66.215.196.168 at 2006-02-01 09:10 (...dhcp.ccmn.ca.charter.com)
• 66.215.196.168 at 2006-02-01 09:11
• 66.215.196.168 at 2006-02-01 09:11 - third time that day
• 136.206.1.17 at 2006-02-01 12:33 (...proxy3.dcu.ie)
• 69.195.15.84 at 2006-02-05 00:41 GMT (...cpe.net.cable.rogers.com)
• 68.230.173.217 at 2006-02-08 14:46 (...nc.hr.cox.net)
• 68.230.173.217 at 2006-02-08 14:51
• 68.230.173.217 at 2006-02-08 15:00
• 68.230.173.217 at 2006-02-08 15:00
• 68.230.173.217 at 2006-02-08 15:01
• 195.93.21.71 at 2006-02-08 21:25 (cache-los-ac07.proxy.aol.com)
• 172.209.210.215 at 2006-02-09 21:23 (...ipt.aol.com)

Picture of the day

Ice eggs, also known as ice balls, are a rare phenomenon caused by a process in which small pieces of sea ice in open water are rolled over by wind and currents in freezing conditions and grow into spheroid pieces of ice. They sometimes collect into heaps of balls on beaches where they pack together in striking patterns. The gentle churn of water, blown by a suitably stiff breeze, makes concentric layers of ice form on a seed particle that then grows into the floating ball as it rolls through the freezing currents. This formation of ice eggs was photographed in 2014 on Stroomi Beach in Tallinn, Estonia. The temperature was around −20 to −15 °C (−4 to 5 °F), and the diameter of each ball around 5 to 10 centimetres (2 to 4 in).Photograph credit: Aleksandr Abrosimov

Stuff wot I done wrote

What can I say. I edit stuff occasionally (often on computing, Ireland, gramer an speling). And I'm called Paul.

Some articles I've written or contributed significantly to include:

• Belfast Agreement
• Northern Ireland peace process - still needs work on later setions
• Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland
• Independent International Commission on Decommissioning
• Internet governance - added historical perspective on current model - not mostly about the UN any more :)
• Internet protocol suite - clarifications of what goes where in the stack, and how some of the protocols interrelate. At least it was clearer to me, after I'd updated it! Fortunately other people have made it even clearer ;-)
• Legal aspects of computing - a rambling (but slightly structured) list of articles and topics - my initial attempt to gather together some threads of where law and computing meet. More links and articles welcome :-)
• EU Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions - this one was a bit controversial...
• Northern Ireland peace process - this still needs some work on events after the Assembly started.

There are probably more - maybe even on interesting topics - but I can't seem to think of any right now.

Random comments :-)

Well, hello vanishing Paul;-) -- WojPob

Hi, Woj! -- Paul >:<

I think I need to reference this RFC .

FTP and Secure variants

Right now, this is just a set of notes for me... A disambiguation / introduction article might have less information than this. It might also have corrections.

There is a maze of file transfer protocols - especially when you start to look at secure ones. It's complicated by the way many of them use identical or similar names.

1. FTP - the venerable and insecure file transfer protocol, uses 2 connections on different ports (20 & 21)
   • RFC 959 (with later extensions)
   • active mode: client tells server which port it is listening on, server connects from port 20 & exchanges file
   • passive mode: client asks server to pick a port, client connects to that port on server (works better with NAT)
2. SSH file transfer protocol (files exchanged using ssh on port 22)
   • no RFC for this. Most widely used versions v3 & v4 (v6 was documented in an expired internet draft)
   • this is PROBABLY the one you want, for transferring files securely
   • sftp (by OpenSSH) is one client for this protocol
   • not to be confused with FTP over SSH, sometimes called Secure FTP (rare)
   • Secure File Transfer Protocol sometimes refers to SSH file transfer protocol (& sometimes to FTP over SSH)
   • compare with scp (secure copy, which is a simpler file copy protocol also run over ssh)
   • end to end security => harder to proxy/control/log at network perimiter (man in the middle proxies exist)
3. FTP with SSL/TLS, (aka ftp-ssl, or ftps, or ftp secure) ?
   • RFC 4217 (uses same security standards/certs as secure https web traffic - server needs a certificate)
   • firewall issue - cannot snoop packets to determine what ports to open for ftp data channel
   • implicit security - deprecated, uses tcp ports 989 & 990.
   • explicit security - through new ftp AUTH command in RFC 2228, same ports as normal ftp
4. FTP over SSH
   • because FTP uses multiple connections, it it trickier to use over ssh.
   • needs intelligence in the file transfer client or in the ssh client to ensure both connections are encrypted
5. Secure File Transfer Protocol (secure FTP) is a confusing term
   • sometimes it refers to SSH file transfer protocol (2, above - possibly due to the latter's "sftp" client)
   • sometimes it refers to FTP over SSH (3, above)
6. Simple File Transfer Protocol (rarely used)
   • RFC 913: uses port 115, ancient
   • this is a silly protocol. Don't go there.
7. TFTP - Trivial FTP (insecure, simple, sometimes used for booting over network)
   • RFC 1350: via UDP
   • not useful for generalised file transfer