IIST, D EPARTMENT OF AVIONICS

File Transfer Protocol

Pinaki Ranjan Sarkar

March 14, 2016

File Transfer Protocol is a standard protocol which allows a host to transfer files to or
from a remote host through internet. It is the most secure way to exchange files as the FTP
users may have to authenticate themselves to the access the remote account. Sometimes it
does not need authentication as the remote server is configured to allow anonymous hosts.
FTPs client server architecture often secured with SSL/TLS.
FTP was invented at MIT (Massachusetts Institutes of Technology) when a file transfer system between two MIT machines were developed. Many RFC (Request For Comments)
have made improvements to the basic architecture of the protocol after the RFC 114(written
by Abhay Bhushan). We are now using the RFC 959 version.
FTP runs on top of TC and FTP uses two parallel TCP connections to transfer a file, a
control connection and a data connection. Control connection maintains the control information such as user identification, authentication, commands to put or get files between
two hosts. The data connection is used for sending a file. There are two different modes in
FTP working. In active mode the control connection is initiated by client to port 21. The
client also sends command to change the directory at the server side. The server initiates a
data connection back to the client side to transfer data. In the passive mode the client does
all the initiating job so the server uses the command channel to send the information to the
client that it needs to open a data connection. This passive mode works well across firewalls and Network Address Translation. The control connections are persistent throughout
the sessions where the data connection is non persistent. It keeps track of state of the user
throughout the session.
HTTP and FTP are both file transferring protocols and both have many common features. The main difference is that FTP is two way TCP connection for file transferring while
HTTP is strictly one way transferring protocol. Another difference is that HTTP sends its control information in-band while FTP sends its information out-of-band. FTP systems encode
and transmit the data in binary which makes it faster than the MIME encoded HTTP systems.

There are three different types of FTP commands:

Access control commands
Transfer control commands
FTP service commands
Some commonly used FTP clients are:
FileZilla
Fire FTP
Dreamweaver
FTP is mainly used for downloading MP3. Online games rely heavily on FTP. Online trading
use FTP for business.

R EFERENCES :
wikipedia
Computer Networking by Kurose and Ross
webopedia
searchenterprisewan
slideshare