On 6/14/07, Marc Espie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think I'm starting to figure out what goes wrong with pkg_add and ftp... For those people who know network stuff, you know ftp is special, in that there are two opened connections, one for control, and one for data. This was a pretty rad design when it happened... but not surprisingly, nobody designs protocols this way now. Enter network equipment. Mostly stupid stuff. Runs idiotic proprietary software, or dumb linux shit, or has been configured by idiots. In any case, most of these equipments don't know shit about ftp. You have to play games (active/passive) to get them to open connections. This, however, does not solve the NEXT problem, which is that of aggressive timeouts. For many reasons, some genuine, some not, these equipments expire connections faster than a lemming goes over the next cliff. This is called `aggressive'. In many cases, it's just a control freak of an administrator who is worried that someone might be misusing his precious resources. In other cases, it's just stupid equipment that can't handle the load. And these equipments are dumb, they don't know the control connection is related to the data connection. So a file transfer goes like this: send some commands, open a data connection, and transfer the file... during the transfer, the control connection stays silent... that is, totally silent. And then, we come back up, and there is NO control connection left. Over the lousy five minutes it took us to transfer the file, the dumb network shit expired it... This is a total waste of resource: everything else involved is just stuck wasting time, your ftp client is waiting for the server to ack, the server has a connection standing there waiting for the next client command... It all boils down to: ftp is broken. Most of the time. Badly. We may put work-arounds in the ftp command, but the protocol no longer work. Most networks have broken it, somewhere along the line... I wonder if it would be possible, to allow the OpenBSD install script that
comes on the CD or even bsd.rd to use sftp as an install option., and you are very correct ftp it BROKEN about 80% of the time.
