RE: Additional thoughts on text transfers

[Richard Whalen <Whalenr%process.com@localhost>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeffrey Altman [mailto:jaltman%columbia.edu@localhost]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 10:28 AM
> To: Markus Friedl
> Cc: Damien Miller; Richard Whalen; 'ietf-ssh%netbsd.org@localhost'
> Subject: Re: Additional thoughts on text transfers
> 
> 
> > On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 12:16:19AM -0500, Jeffrey Altman wrote:
> > > > That kinda proves the point that I was trying to make - 
> that the format
> > > > decision and processing can be built into the clients 
> (or servers) and not
> > > > into the protocol itself.
> > > 
> > > No it doesn't.  It provies that it must be built into the 
> protocol.
> > 
> > Then why does everybody write lines and lines of email instead of
> > writing a draft using the mechanisms provided by
> > 	draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-02.txt
> > 
> 
> For a very simple reason:
> 
>   up until the last six months or so the only significant deployment
>   of SSH v2 and SFTP was on Unix or Windows.  Therefore, the only 
>   developers working on the protocol were people that didn't 
> care about
>   this functionality.  
> 
> I must assume that Process Software is now implementing SSHv2 on
> OpenVMS.  Therefore, there is now someone that might care enough to
> take the responsibility of authorship.  However, as Richard points
> out the IESG is perfectly capable and often willing to impose design 
> requirements on a working group if they believe that the protocol that
> has been designed does not provide for operating system independence.

Process Software recently shipped SSH2 & SCP2 with MultiNet 4.4, based on
the F-Secure 2.4.0 build 15 code.
We are currently working on integrating the F-Secure 3.1.0 code with TCPware
(the version number will probably be 5.6), which is expected to ship this
summer (Northern Hemisphere).

We found the extended attribute mechanism in SFTP to be very flexible for
maintaining the VMS file attributes when transferring files between VMS
systems.

We determined before we went to Beta test that a binary only transfer
mechanism would not meet our customer needs for transferring text files.  We
can determine which files may be translatable, and have provided a
translation mechanism.  These mechanisms work well when the file is accessed
sequentially, but are ad-hoc (environment variables).

I have not started prototyping any protocols due to time constraints.
Exchanging ideas via email on how to deal with the text transfer problem has
been useful to help figure out what might have to be added to the protocol.

I don't know whether or not I will be able to travel to IETF, I do have time
to work on this via email.

----------------------
Richard Whalen
Process Software