Re: avoiding reinventing the wheel on file transfer.

[Mats Andersson <mats%mindbright.se@localhost>]

Hi,

On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, David B. Coningham wrote:
> uses PASV to establish the data connection rather than PORT.  PORT
> currently cannot be used very effectively because of a limitation with
> the remote port forwarding mechanism: it does not provide a way to
> determine the actual port number to which the listening socket is
> bound (if 0 is requested).

You can of course support PORT too (which we do) since you can just loop
and take a random high port to listen to and see if it works (almost
always works on first attempt also so mostly not very inefficient :-).

> For this reason it would be desirable to see the remote port
> forwarding response changed to include the port number.

However, as you say (and many have said earlier) it would be a nice (and
trivial) addition that listening on 0 remotely replies with an extra field
with the actual port number if succesful.

Cheers,

/Mats