KSendFile 0.8a

KSendfile is a native SAFT client. Compared to the Bitnet up to now there was no asynchronous file transfer service defined in the Internet. The existing standard file transfer, the ftp, is a synchronous service: an interactive login on both ends of the file transfer is mandatory for the user to set up a connection between both points.
If a user A wants to send a file to user B they have the following choices:
- ftp to a recipients account B
In this case one has to know the password of the recipients account. If A and B are not the identical person, severe questions of security arise and it is not the method of choice. Even if account A and B belong to the same person, the typed ASCII password characters for ftp access will travel open (readable) as ordinary TCP packets through the network.
- ftp using an anonymous ftp server
The file has to be uploaded by A onto the anonymous ftp server using an ftp session. After that A has to notify B about this using e-mail informing this user about the fact that the file is ready for download now. B can get the file now by doing another ftp transfer. This procedures requires a common reachable ftp server, with an upload (write access) facility. During the time the file resides on the anonymous ftp server it is open to anyone, it may be readable, writeable, changeable or erasable.
- sending a file via e-mail
A is sending a file to B enclosed into an e-mail. According to RFC 822 a mail must contain characters from the NVT-ASCII character set, which is a subset of the 7 bit ASCII character set. The file transfer via e-mail is limited to English text documents or the text to be sent must be encoded properly, of course using the NVT-ASCII character set. Encoding procedures like uuencode or MIME are available. It is not a pleasure to use either of them, they dont support all file ownership attributes and they will enlarge the amount of data to be transferred by encoding. In addition to this most of the existing MTAs are not designed to handle large amount of data transfers.
To avoid all the described disadvantages the SAFT-protocol (Simple Asynchronous File Transfer) has been developed and the sendfile software has been created as a reference implementation for UNIX platforms.
Enhancements:
- Fixed a bug in ksendfilenetclient::sendFile when getting status code 531
- Added Resend Function
- Fixed bug in ksendfilenetclient::sendfile in the date function
- Now sends the file date, not the actual system date.