On Thu, 2025-07-10 at 13:55 -0400, Jeffrey Walton wrote: > On Thu, Jul 10, 2025 at 1:39 PM Charles Curley > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Thu, 10 Jul 2025 18:58:03 +0200 > > hw <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > When running it on Debian, filezilla shows a password request for > > > anonymous logins, and the login fails. This is not what the man page > > > says. The ftp user doesn't have a password anyway. Apparently, > > > Debians pure-ftpd version doesn't understand that it must not ask for > > > a password for anonymous logins for unknown reasons. > > > > I seem to recall that the anonymous was exactly that, anonymous. I.e. > > the server would let anyone log in. But that didn't mean no login, > > like a web page. It meant you logged in with the user name "anonymous" > > and any password you liked. > > > > Since the Internet was much smaller, more friendly, and more courteous, > > FTP site operators liked to know who there users were. So it became the > > custom to use your email address as your password, thus identifying > > yourself to your kindly hosts. > > Yeah, that's what I remember, too. Back when FTP was used. > > Nowadays it seems like scp and sftp are the norm, not ftp.
(S)FTP is still in use like for cameras, scanners (printers) and phones. For local usages I don't want to do all the hassle the certificates bring about unless it particularly makes sense to use encryption. There isn't even a good alternative to (S)FTP when the devices aren't setting the limits but when you need the functionality. Scp isn't necessarily an alternative since you don't want to give everyone shell access. IIRC emacs supposedly prefers rsync instead of scp, but scp works too well to use rsync instead ...

