New tools for finding information on the Internet are developed on a regular basis. Some, such as Gopher, take off immediately. Others, such as the Web, take a few years to catch on. Others still, such as Versatile Message Transfer Protocol (VMTP), never catch on.
This chapter looks at a few of the newest tools. Some of these may be important over the next several years. Others may die off, although lessons may be learned from them that may affect more mainstream protocols. The Internet is definitely a survival-of-the-fittest environment dictated by usage and not standards dictated by organizations. Although a standards-creation process exists, an official standard is only accepted if multiple working implementations exist.
The first tool to be discussed is FSP. FSP stands for File Service Protocol (although it has also been called File Slurping Protocol, Flaky Stream Protocol, and FTP's Sexier Partner). In particular, FSP is designed to solve some of the server performance problems of FTP.
The second tool is Harvest. Harvest is a generalized caching/indexing system for the Web, Gopher, and FTP. It has the potential to make the Internet more efficient and easier to use.
The final tool discussed here is Hyper-G. Hyper-G is another system like Gopher or the World Wide Web, but offers much greater functionality. Its proponents say it is going to overtake the Web the way the Web overtook Gopher. Its critics say it has some good points but that the Web has too much momentum behind it for Hyper-G to replace the Web.
FSP is designed as an alternative to anonymous FTP and is in no way geared to transfer a file between two accounts. The problem with anonymous FTP has historically been that it is extremely resource intensive on the server side. Each person connected to the server is usually an extra server process that eats up resources—especially memory. Another problem is that high-volume FTP sites can at times cause a link to be saturated.
These problems are partially fixed by the wuarchive FTP server. It limits the number of simultaneous connections and controls how much bandwidth is allocated to each user. However, FSP is even better protected against these problems than wuarchive.
FSP is slower than FTP at transferring files. It is important to note that this is a design feature and not a bug; it helps prevent FSP sites from getting flooded. FSP also conserves resources because all connections are handled by a single process on the server.
If an FTP transfer is aborted, there is no way to continue the transfer. You must restart it from the beginning. FSP is designed to be able to continue a transfer at any point where it left off. In fact, if you really want to, you can transfer just parts of a file using FSP.
It is important to note that FSP has the reputation of being a hacker and pornography protocol. Many hackers use FSP to set up FSP servers in their accounts (which is easier to do than with FTP) and let just a few people know about it. FSP's use with pornography comes from the fact that any time an anonymous FTP site carrying pornography becomes publicly known, it is instantly brought to its knees by hundreds if not thousands of people trying to grab pictures from it. Therefore, people wanting to make pornographic pictures publicly available use FSP because it has protection against being saturated in this way. Also, there are fewer FSP users so the potential flood is much smaller.
Although these uses for FSP do exist, it is important to remember that it is a generic protocol. It is used for many other purposes and should not be thought of in just these terms.
FSP software exists for a variety of platforms, although UNIX has the most software. The base FSP package includes the server and the original client software, which is a set of various commands. Although these commands are useful for scripting and doing other work at the same time, they are somewhat awkward to learn. Therefore, a set of other client's programs (fspclient, fspcli, and fspsh) were created to be very similar to the FTP user interface. Table 30.1 lists all known versions of FSP software.
Software |
URL |
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FSP (UNIX/VMS) |