PuTTY wish portfwd-ftp

This is a mirror. Follow this link to find the primary PuTTY web site.

summary: Support for tunnelling FTP
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
depends: mdpi
priority: dormant: This is an old feature request that we no longer think is relevant.

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.)

SGT, 2024-11-17: classifying this wish as dormant. FTP is fading into the past now that everyone prefers encrypted file transfer protocols (either HTTPS or SFTP), so it doesn't seem vital any more to add extra complexity in port forwarding to support it. Newer protocols are aware that they might be running over NATs or proxies, and avoid this kind of connection interdependence in the first place.

If you want to comment on this web site, see the Feedback page.

Audit trail for this wish.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2024-11-17 14:53:03 +0000)