Re: [xml] Windows Binaries And The Web

[Igor Zlatkovic <igor zlatkovic com>]

Bruce Miller wrote:
> Getting even more OT...
> Do you really need FTP?  I've been trying to ween away from it.
> The speed advantage seems to have become minimal, and it's trickier to 
> secure.
> Our sysadmins insist on configuring the ftp server with reverse dns checks,
> with the consequence that every couple of months (just long enough to 
> forget the logic :>)
> I get reports of people with flakey ISP setups not able to connect...

Off topic or not, here is the answer. :)

My former life without FTP was rewarded with a bill for the overtraffic. 
I beamed, thinking half of the world came to visit me. The HTTP logs 
have shaken me awake. I found that few idiots out there have nothing 
better to do than to download one and the same, unchanged file three 
times a second, in a massive parallelism, obviously automated. Tcpdump 
said, even firewalled out, they kept drumming before the gate for days. 
FTP was a lot easier to control that sort of traffic with, so I started 
offering the files through FTP only.

This is not an issue any longer, because my provider has recently raised 
the bandwidth and the all-inclusive traffic by tenfold. Now the idiots 
cannot cause overtraffic before I spot them and beautify my firewall 
rules with their addresses. But many honest people link to the FTP 
resources now.

Ciao,
Igor