having finally installed FC7 on one of my systems, i’ve been trying to set it up as a testing server for developing this site. this involves getting all of the files off of that server and onto mine. let’s just say i have a lot of directories on that server, with barely any organization.

now to my rant.

apparently the creators of the built-in ftp program (or the protocol in general) included in linux didn’t think of adding a recursive get command, so i’d have to sit there and manually create all of the directories on the machine i’m getting to, then change to that directory, then do a command like ‘mget -d *’. that doesn’t work.

so i installed midnight commander. maybe i’m a retard, but that program is basically counter-intuitive to me. i gave up.

tried to setup a samba share on the system so i could just download everything onto my Windows X-Pee laptop then copy them back. had a ton of user authentication issues there. i’ve setup samba shares on servers before with AD/LDAP authentication, but apparently i couldn’t figure it out here. i gave up.

i tried gftp, running it from an X-tunneled ssh connection to the server on my Windows XP laptop. segmentation fault during transfer. neat. i gave up.

i found a script written in ksh (HardFeed) that promised recursive get of files through FTP. that sort of worked. first i had to install ksh, because it’s not included in the default install of FC7. fine. then, the script kept would constantly time out and had no status whatsoever. so i’d be stuck there waiting for an error message that would come around 5 minutes later (i edited the timeout in the script, that didn’t help). i gave up.

finally, i found yafc (yet another ftp client). ‘yum install yafc’ and i was ready to go. it connected easily, and a quick read of the docs lead me to the ‘get -rp *’ command. yay.

wtf is the problem with just putting this kind of command into the default FTP client installed?? or putting a useful ‘mget’ command into the protocol?? a big fuck you to whoever designed that piece of shit.

rant over. now returning to my expletive-free-ness. for now.