FTP Again

Really, I can't believe it. I am back to my problems with ftp again. FTP is so limited: the in-built security breach with unencrypted password is only the tip of the iceberg. Today, I realized  that the limitation that you cannot transfer from one remote site to another etc. is most likely built in the protocol specification. What I don't quite get is how so many people (including me) still use it? How can web providers still offer only ftp access and nothing else. And above all, if that is the case why are there not better perl modules for ftp around. I mean Net::FTP is excellent, but it is low level. Clearly, that's what it is supposed to be. But what so many people need would be a nice higher level that acts pretty much like a file system. Is there something NFS over FTP? Sounds crazy? Yes! I guess I just try to get around paying for SSH access. But again: there should be thousands of people like me, so what do I have to look for to find what I need. What I would be looking for, would be ideally, multi-protocol (ftp, WebDav) and allow many higher level things (mirroring, syncing) to several sites. And it wouldn't hurt if it could do clever things like the partial update of rsync etc. Well that's not possible over ftp.

There are some things that I didn't know about so far:

• a small windows util to create drive letter for ftp hosts: FTPDrive
• CPAN module File::DirSync which has FTP on TODO, but not yet implemented
• ftpfs over FUSE