monline

I've googled for others' experiences on SFTP transfer speeds and found that many could not go over a few (3-4) MB/s. Not even if testing between servers on the same LAN. I've run my own tests now and got 50MB/s sustainable speed between two PCs. Both have the same architecture:

• Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 (2.4GHz) CPU
• 4GB RAM
• 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Marvel Technology Group Ltd.)

The sshd on the target server pushed one of the cores of the CPU to 75%. However the speed was far beyond 3-4 MB/s that many others experienced.

I've found many questions on the net regarding the topic so it's time I give you my own answer. In case of SFTP you're lucky: you've at least two methods to do it ...

I've been using FileZilla for ages now, but in the recent 3.x versions I had problems with password handling. The bookmarks feature is called "Site Manager" here. Each bookmark in Site Manager has a "logontype" parameter which can have a value of "Anonymous", "Normal", "Ask for password", "Interactive" and "Account". Without documentation (since FileZilla does not have any) it's not trivial to find out what each of these does.

What's scponly? Here's a quote from its official website: "scponly is an alternative 'shell' (of sorts) for system administrators who would like to provide access to remote users to both read and write local files without providing any remote execution priviledges. Functionally, it is best described as a wrapper to the tried and true ssh suite of applications.

A typical usage of scponly is in creating a semi-public account not unlike the concept of anonymous login for ftp. This allows an administrator to share files in the same way an anon ftp setup would, only employing all the protection that ssh provides. This is especially significant if you consider that ftp authentications traverse public networks in a plaintext format."