FTP Crash Recovery

[Mahesh Neelakanta]

  From my days as a bbs user, I used to use a beautiful program called
Zmodem which is used to transfer files from one system to another. The
new releases of Zmodem support Crash Recovery which is used when you
lose connection to the other computer and have only like 50% of the
file transferred. Zmodem then resumes the transfer from where I left
off saving *tons* of money if I was using a long distance connection.

  My comp.unix.question? Would this not be a real nice addition to the
FTP program? For example, suppose you are pulling a real *big* program
via anon ftp and suddenly you lose the connection. Now you have to
restart the whole thing again wasting bandwith, etc. Maybe instead, 
the recieving ftp process should say to the sender "Hey, I already have
xxxxx bytes out of the 16Meg file, so lets just send checksums until
we get xxxxx bytes and then continue normal transmission". 

Mahesh

Mahesh Neelakanta                               Internet: mahesh at cs.fau.edu
Florida Atlantic University                               mahesh at acc.fau.edu
(407) 367-3981                                  Bitnet:   mahesh at fauvax

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