Firstly, base your choice on the need, not on what standard.
What HW platforms do you have, what products do they support, do you have
communication within or outside of the organisation and if so, what standard do
the external partner have or is willing to use/accept.
When you know that, you know what to use as 1:st choice.
(1) Secure FTP (SSL:FTPS)
- Any pitfalls I need to be aware of from a
setup/implementation standpoint?
Haven't used FTP/S so I can't really say, but on AS/400 and some other IBM
mainframe env. it is standard. SSH/sftp do not exist. Tumbleweed and Ipswitch
have Unix/PC versions.
- How would the authentication to MySQL user
database work?
? Wasn't it ftp the question was about? Do not run MySQL or any ftp-pluggin.
(2) Secure HTTP (https)
- Any pitfalls I need to be aware of from a
setup/implementation standpoint?
Isn't real ftp, need the backend "CGI" to check transport. Usage more depending
on if only web-access or not. Probably more unsecure, due to more security
failings in web servers.
(3)
a. Scp:
b. Sftp: Is it an interactive program? Does it
provide non-interactive authentication?
Well, if using sftp (scp) you have ssh and therefore can let all terminal users
run ssh, increasing security. On the other side, do you have ssh, you already
have sftp, same coin.
Have only worked with sftp, not scp, but with certificates generated, it is
easy to make batch processes for it. Basis is the following (can be made more
"unreadable" = efficient) Solaris Unix script:
---
SFILE="$HOME/cache/acme.dat"
/usr/5bin/echo "put $SFILE \n quit \n" |\
sftp acme.batch@ac1.acme.com
---
Did a sftp batch control shellscript some months ago, that now runs regular for
a data transfer.
Server exist for PC and different Unixes as well as OpenVMS (HP own version
recommended by users). ws_ftp client/server works both ftp/s as sftp (and PGP
to top up ;-) SSH.com and F-Secure/WRQ have the most known commercial versions,
while OpenSSH.org is the freeware.
Only thing to remember, if you run OpenSSH Win-server, the server needs to be
run as a ordinary process, not server, and to own it's resources and disk
areas. We had problems with that.
regards/kurt
