PuTTY wish portfwd-ftp

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summary: Support for tunnelling FTP
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
depends: mdpi
priority: low: We aren't sure whether to fix this or not.

FTP is inherently difficult to tunnel over SSH, because it uses multiple network connections, so the `obvious' approach of just forwarding port 21 doesn't work.

To support this, PuTTY would need to grovel inside inside the application-layer protocol and rewrite PORT commands and such, or alternatively, provide an FTP proxy.

Either of these would be quite a large and fiddly feature, and given that we already support alternative secure file-transfer solutions (scp, sftp), we're unlikely to implement this ourselves. In fact, in order not to bloat the core of PuTTY, we probably wouldn't contemplate it at all unless it could be implemented as a separate DLL.

As a special case, a SOCKSified FTP client can work with PuTTY's existing dynamic forwarding if you use passive mode. (This requires that both FTP client and server support it.)

Audit trail for this wish.


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(last revision of this bug record was at 2005-06-11 14:56:39 +0100)