On Sun, 3 Mar 2002, Seth Kurtzberg wrote:

: Can you elaborate on this?  I'm somewhat confused because when I do a packet
: trace of what is happening during an sftp

sftp, as part of OpenSSH, utilizes a *SSH*, not SSL, connection in order to
do its command channel.  (I'm not entirely sure what the data channel
connection is, but I believe it's muxed over the initial ssh connection
similarly to SSH port-forwarding requests.)

: Also, I don't know of a case where sftp is not available.

What I said is:

: > It's supported by many third party clients whereas SFTP
: > is much more narrow in availability....

Not everyone wants to switch to a cumbersome interface when they've been
using a well-known FTP client for ages.  And on Windows boxen, switching to
the SSH.COM-provided sftp client qualifies as a "switch to a cumbersome
interface."

(In particular, Fetch on Mac and WS_FTP on Windows both support FTP-over-SSL
out of the box, but not SFTP.)

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