Comment by m463

1 day ago

> There is a whole lot that SSH can do that most people don't know about.

I had to port ssh to embedded hardware decades ago, and pulling back the curtains I came to the opinion that everything was a mess.

for example, I needed to be able to upload/download firmware, and was surprised to find that scp wasn't a pure file transfer protocol. It is more like "log into the remote system via shell and run a file transfer program"

There are lots of other things I didn't like, like wholesale transferring environment variables back and forth, weird shell interactions and more.

It is very useful, but it is an organically grown program, not a designed protocol.

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m463

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woooooo  1 day ago

Scp not needing its own protocol is a feature and not a bug in my book..

  • m463  1 day ago

    thing is, there IS a transfer protocol, there are just no controls on the files. If you can log in, there is just passing security.

    Just take a step back and think what you could do if it were a protocol:

    - limit visible files

    - limit access to files by user

    - make access strictly read-only

    - allow upload-only (sort of a dropbox)

    - clear separation between login access and file access

    - remove login user from the whole mess

    - trivially tie in as a filesystem.

    etc...