sftp

[kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2007, Pavel Tsekov wrote:

> Hello Alexander,
>
> Saturday, October 20, 2007, 12:54:04 AM, you wrote:
>
>> does the current version of mc
>> support sftp or scpy? Are there
>> the plans to use sftp instead of
>> ftp virtual file system?
>
> MC has FISH which is emulating a file system over ssh i.e.
> listing directories, copying, moving, deleting files/directories
> and so on.

Pavel,

Might I add a comment here?

I have used this, and it works. I have not used it in the new test 
version because of some difficulty with it in the previous version. 
When I say that, I should explain, so here is the explanation. The 
environment in which I have used it is as follows:

I have a nome machine (on which I am typing this) and an office machine 
(to which I am currently connected, as it is among other things my mail 
server). Sometimes, I want to move large quantities of stuff from office 
to home or home to office. What I discovered, by actually trying it, is 
that there is somehow a huge overhead which makes things go rather slowly. 
One of the biggest problems is that when I do the connection then it takes 
a very long time, apparently during which the entire filesystem on the 
other end has to be read (and it is not small, but by today's standards 
not huge, by any means). During this time one can do just about nothing at 
all with the FISH connection. Thus, I have for a long time I have not used 
this feature.

Thus, the situation last time I tried it seemed to be that this is a 
really neat idea which would be just beautiful if it would only work with 
reasonable speed in practice. But somewhere in the procedure there was 
just too much overhead. I wonder if it is possible to do any 
streamlining.

As to the way to interface with this feature, there are no problems at 
all. Just use the F9 menu to get the option of a network connection, 
choose Shell link... and enter the machine name, then a password at the 
prompt. This IMHO could not be improved in any way whatsoever. The 
problems all come afterwards.

I am sorry to say that I do not know enough about such things that I could 
be of help in this. If I did know enough I would be glad to help out 
instead of being in the rather uncomfortable role of pointing out 
problems.

Theodore Kilgore