[SLUG] FTP

[aardvark llama]

>al wrote:
>Over the last few days I've been experimenting with using ftp from the
>command line.  I've been able to upload and download files from a >couple  
>of sites OK, but on connecting I get these messages.
ftp is a very old protocol and is increasingly frowned upon because -- like 
telnet -- it sends unencrypted passwords down the wire which can easily be 
captured by somebody-else-who-may-be-up-to-no-good. However, for stuff like 
anonymous transfers it is rather good.

>500 'AUTH GSSAPI' is not a valid command
>500 'AUTH KERBEROS_V4' is not a valid command
>KERBEROS_V4 rejected as an authentication type
>
>Should I be doing anything about this?
My understanding is that both GSSAPI and KERBEROS_V4 are ways of providing 
encrypted authentication. (AFAIK they have *nothing* to do with ftp per se 
but I could see how these could be useful. For you trivia fans, Kerberos was 
developed at MIT as part of the Athene project -- for example, you may have 
come across athene widgets as an option when as part of the configuration 
for building (x)emacs -- to improve security between servers on a LAN for 
stuff like autohome mounting with NIS+ or X authentication.)

>Are these from a list of authentication types the FTP server I'm >connected 
>to is running through from a list supplied by my computer and >it's just 
>showing the rejected ones?
Without knowing stuff like what ftp program you are using or what ftp site 
you are connecting to, it becomes difficult to say. Is this accross this 
internet? or something you have configured locally? I would only expect to 
see stuff like this if you were connecting locally to an ftp daemon running 
on the local machine as this looks like some kind of NIS or PAM 
configuration response. Hmmm.

>Or should I configure any files on my local machine to stop this?
Hmmm. There are rather a lot of configuration files on a linux box. Could 
you be a bit more specific?
>The example I have from a couple of tutorials show nothing like this.
It would suprise me too.

>Comments please!
I hope this helps -- that is if you ignore the rambling...

;)w

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