Every Flavour Beans

FTP is still the best way to upload or download the files/folders from a website. I use gFTP to upload the files to my web space and its quite efficient at the job. Even if the connection gets interrupted in the middle of a transfer, it automatically reconnects and completes the job. It has many other useful features too. One feature that I thought was lacking in it is the ability to move a folder from one location to the other within the same server. Other people had complained for its lack of ability to move a file from one server to another server without involving the local machine in the process. Though many FTP clients do support such a feature(including gFTP, as I discovered later), I started searching for a dedicated FXP client. But what is FXP? From Wikipedia:

File eXchange Protocol (FXP) is a method of data transfer which uses the FTP protocol to transfer data from one remote server to another without routing this data through the client’s connection.

Note that FXP transfers need relevant support on the server side too(they must support PASV mode and PORT commands) – otherwise the FXP client can’t do anything about it. To install a FXP client on Gentoo:

1. Add the following line to the file /etc/portage/package.keywords :
   >=net-ftp/gtkfxp-0.5 ~x86
2. Emerge the package and run it:
   sh# emerge gtkfxp
   sh# gtkfxp &

Click the Connect button on the left side and fill the settings of the first server in the popped up dialog box, then click the Connect button on the right side and fill out the settings of the second server. You can now start transferring the files in between these two servers without involving your local machine. You can enter the information about the same server in both the dialog boxes if you want to transfer the files within the same server. Note that this software is buggy and very crash prone. gFTP too supports FXP transfers but it is seriously lacking in the documentation. I recently got an email from Chris explaining how to do FXP transfers in gFTP. The procedure described was like this:

Here’s how to use FXP wit gFTP: First, FXP requires you to connect to both sites
using the normal client. To do so please use Menu “FTP” -> “Window 1″ and then
select one of your bookmarked sites, and wait till it has properly connected.
You will see the file listing appear in window 1, which is the left panel.
Switch to “Window 2″ using “FTP” -> “Window 2″ and then connect via bookmark
to another (different!) site. That’s it. You can now transfer between them.

Thanks Chris for the great tip!