Subject: Ftp-WG: HOST command and client upgrades

From: Dave Cridland <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 07:43:23 -0400

Oddly enough, I'm coming to the conclusion that perhaps it's a good idea,
but not quite how we thought of it before...

For instance, is there anything stopping us from saying, "Here's a HOST
command, now use it.", but, at the same time, offer an interim fix for
servers which states:

"If your FTP implementation supports v-hosting, and is not given a HOST
command to explicitly state the host required, then look in the USER for
overloading.

"If your FTP implementation supports v-hosting and *is* given a HOST
directive, and the username given does not exist, see if it's got
overloading, and discard whatever the potential host part says, and try the
username again."

What this means, if my brain is actually working, is that the HOST command -
which I beleive is the better solution if it were taken up by clients - can
be worked around given the overloaded USER we've been talking about, and yet
we still aim in the right direction. Ultimately, we end up with HOST support
in both clients and servers, without any USER overloading.

We use the HOST wherever it's found, but we also get the benefits of USER
overloading, which is useful for the support of older clients, as well as
the ability to put that detail in URLs.

If usernames are meant to have '@' (substitute other delimiter at will) in
them, then these work fine with HOST, however, if the information is given
twice, then we throw away the information that's potentially less reliable
(due to manual entry in URLs, etc).

The only problem is when you've got a user "fish" on a v-host
"alpha.isp.com", no HOST command, and a user "[email-masked]" on the
default site. I imagine you'd have to try both, and see which it was by the
password, something that's been mentioned before here many moons past -
Stephen Tihor mentioned it, I think.

I'm certainly not claiming that this is a perfect idea by a long stretch,
but it seems to make some sense to me right now. Feel free to point out the
errors of my ways.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Mikkelsen [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 1999 3:02 AM
To: FTPEXT Working Group
Subject: Ftp-WG: HOST command and client upgrades

[ ... ]

I agree.  In fact I'm coming around to the conclusion that a separate HOST
command is a bad idea, and a standardised FEAT attribute and mechanism for
embedding a hostname in the USER argument is the way to go.  In any case, it
doesn't make much sense to have HOST as it currently stands in the mlst
draft.

[ ... ]

---

From: Stephen Tihor <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 23:57:40 -0400

I did. I will mention its a pretty rare case and currently does not support
ftp but may in the future.

---

From: Stephen Tihor <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 00:03:27 -0400

Note that LYRIS is an mailing list application that offers various 
services from its single virutal server to let folks access the lists
in different ways: http, news, email, etc. 

THe emailaddress isthe natural username there. I think we can acknowledge and ignore such cases.