[30793] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: ARIN Policy on IP-based Web Hosting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard A. Steenbergen)
Thu Aug 31 03:21:09 2000
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 07:18:24 +0000 (GMT)
From: "Richard A. Steenbergen" <ras@e-gerbil.net>
To: Jason Slagle <raistlin@tacorp.net>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0008310707010.6691-100000@overlord.e-gerbil.net>
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On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Jason Slagle wrote:
> The problem is that SCP is several orders of magnitude slower then FTP. I
> use scp, rsync (on top of ssh), nfs, and several other methods of moving
> files around, and ftp blows them all away.
>
> You also need to build a ftp like structure on top of it. ie: I pick the
> files I want instead of having to know the filenames.
>
> Until this happens, I can see no viable alternative to FTP.
>
> I wouldn't be unhappy to see one, but we can't retire it without a good
> replacement that performs nearly as well.
IMHO the original ftp protocol is quite dated, and could be improved upon
in any number of ways, but it probably won't go away any time soon. There
are also a number of secure ftp-like interfaces, including one distributed
w/ssh.
And for the record, there is no inherent reason scp should be more then a
slight bit slower then ftp (overhead - the ssh protocol packetizes data),
other then being purely CPU bound when doing encryption. If you're seeing
even one order of magnitude in performance loss, its probably because
you're using a painfully slow default 3DES. Try changing it to something a
little better like Blowfish, or none if you really want. (A)RC4 is the
least CPU intensive, being a stream cipher, but its not terribly
functional in the ssh protocol.
If you really want to do high performance crypto, check out some hardware
based addons like PowerCrypt (http://www.powercrypt.com), or ASICs from
Hi/fn.
--
Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/humble
PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)
