This section provides an overview of the historical and technical background of the FTP protocol. For detailed in-depth information see specifications. In the fast living world of the internet, the File Transfer Protocol is not just old, it's ancient. The protocol might even be older than you!īack then, the Internet was mainly used by universities and research centers.Įarly drafts of the protocol go back as far as 1971, and the current specifications are from 1985. The community was small, many users knew each other and all were collaborating together. The internet was a friendly, trusting place. Security was not much of a concern.Ī lot has changed since then. The Internet is now ubiquitous, with millions of users communicating with each other in many different ways.

NAT (Network Address Translation) routers.Several attempts have been made to address these problems: The availability and openness has attracted malicious users who exploit design limitations, incomplete implementations, bugs, and the inexperience of other users. Many hosts and routers on the internet use the IPv4 protocol. The number of hosts connected to the internet has reached IPV4's design limit for the number of addresses ( IPv6 is designed to relieve this). Personal firewalls try to protect personal computers from attacks by malicious users.NAT routers allow multiple systems within a LAN to connect to the outside world with one external IP address. Unfortunately, both NAT and personal firewalls conflict with FTP more often than not. To make things worse, some are themselves flawed, causing additional problems regarding FTP. What distinguishes FTP from most other protocols is the use of secondary connections for file transfers. When you connect to an FTP server, you are actually making two connections.

Filezilla tftp server