Now that we're a little more familiar with some of
the common aspects of physical infrastructure,
let's move onto network services.
A network service that's commonly used in organization is a file transfer service.
So why would you want to have a service dedicated to file transfer?
Well, sure, you could probably carry around a flash drive and copy files to
each machine you work on or even use a remote copy tools we learned in the last course,
or you could essentially store huge files and
transfer files from one computer to another using the Internet.
There are a few different file transfer protocol services that are used today.
Let's take a quick rundown of what's out there and what they do.
FTP, in the second course of this program the,
bits and bytes of computer networking,
we mentioned FTP a.k.a the file transfer protocol.
It's a legacy way to transfer files from one computer to another over the Internet,
and it's still in use today.
It's not a super secure way to transfer data because it doesn't handle data encryption.
The FTP service works much like RSH service.
Clients that want to access an FTP server have to install an FTP client.
On the FTP server,
we install the software that allows us to share information
located in the directory on that server.
FTP is primarily used today to share web content.
If you use a website host provider,
you might see that they have an FTP connection already available for
use so they can easily copy files to and from your web site.
SFTP, it's a secure version of FTP,
so it makes sense to choose this option over FTP.
During this SFTP process,
data is sent through SSH and is encrypted.
TFTP stands for trivial FTP.
It's a simpler way to transfer files than using FTP.
TFTP doesn't require user authentication like FTP,
so any files that you store here should be generic and not need to be secure.
A popular use of TFTP is to host installation files.
One method of booting a computer that we haven't discussed yet is PXE or PXE boot,
which stands for preboot execution.
This allows you to boot into a software that's available over the network.
A common use case for organization that want to install software over
a network is to keep operating system installation files in a TFTP server.
That way, when you perform a network boot,
you can be automatically launched into the installer.
This is a lot more efficient than having to carry
around a USB with an operating system image.
You can learn more about PXE boot in the next reading.
Depending on your usage of file transferring services,
you might want to weigh the option we mentioned.
We encourage you to read about popular FTP clients using the supplemental reading.
If you just want to share files between your computers in a secure way and have
a nice directory where you can access
all the shared files instead of transferring them to your machine,
you'll want to look at network file storage services instead.
We'll discuss those in the upcoming module.