Advantage -vs- Disadvantage: SFTP -vs- SCP

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010, Ed Flecko wrote:
>Hi folks,
>I have a server I'm building that is internet accessible and I'm
>wondering if there's any advantages/disadvantages of using either SFTP
>-vs- SCP?

I would say that depends on what software the clients want to
use.  FileZilla works nicely with sftp, and is available on
Windows, OS X, and I presume other *nix platforms (I'm a CLI guy
so only have used it enough to be sure it works).

One can also use the sshfs to provide the ability to mount remote
file systems over an ssh connection.  This requires nothing on
the file server side other than working ssh.  I haven't tried
this on FreeBSD.  On Linux it requires kernel support of fuse,
user level file system.

There's no reason one couldn't use both sftp and scp/sshfs.

We generally don't allow any ssh password access, but require
authorized_keys.  In a few cases where the client absolutely
insists on allowing password authentication, we lock it down to a
limited set of IP addresses.

We have been able to get many clients to use OpenVPN to make
their connections which makes life easier after the initial setup
as all connections are through the OpenVPN tunnel so we don't
have to allow outside ssh access.

Bill
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