Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Instructions of my web hosting provider: "[if you do not want your password to be sent unencrypted] use ftp over tls (explicit encryption)". FileZilla provided that option for MS Windows, I was able to connect with it (so server does support what their documentation says it does), but I do 99% of my work under Linux.
According to [en.wikipedia.org...] , the instructions translate as: "use Explicit FTPS"
The man page of the lftp 3.2.1 client that came with Fedora Core 4 says that it has ftps capabilities if it has been compiled with openssl libraries. According to the advice of the man page, I type "set -a" in a lftp session. Among many other things, this shows me:
set ftps:initial-prot ""
So it appears I should be able to do a ftps connection with it (did I interpret that correctly? I assume that if it were not compiled with ftps support, the option would not appear). If I can just figure out the syntax. I start by first making a ftp (not ftps) connection, to see if it works:
lftp ftp://username@ftp.servername.net/subdirectory
It works. Yes, my password was transmitted in clear once, but I will change it after I get the secure thing working.
I try with the ftps protocol:
lftp ftps://username@ftp.servername.net/subdirectory
It does not work. According to [security.berkeley.edu:2002...] , I put into my ~/.lftprc file:
set ftp:ssl-force true
set ftp:ssl-protect-data true
I do lftp sftp://username@ftp.servername.net/subdirectory . It does not work. Putting
set ftps:initial-prot C
with or without quotation marks around the C, or with S, E, P (the other options in the man page which I do not know what they mean), with or without quotation marks each, does not work.
How do I do it? I am stuck here.
Configuration files:
I would prefer passing an option to lftp instead of putting it into a configuration file. A configuration file would use ftps for all connections, but I do not want that because I also use lftp for anonymous connections without encryption, and I would not want to do an ugly hack like aliasing lftp to something that creates a ~/.lftprc every time a secure connection is started, then removes it. But if the only way is using the ~/.lftprc, I can ultimately live with that.
Why lftp:
I read on the web that scp may work but I want lftp because it has a bash-like interface (I do not have ssh command line interface to the server). Lftp is also standard with FC4 so it has chances of getting into RHEL which I use at work, if it isn't already there (I cannot install software on the company's systems)
At [www3.calvarychapel.com...] it says about lftp that "SSL/TLS is automatically detected and works out of the box". Does this mean that when I did lftp ftp://username... it actually connected through ftps? The info at calvarychapel does not look very reliable, they say they did not actually test if lftp works with their tls-enabled server.
Thanks again.
