FTP over Satellite/High Latency connections

Question

I use FTP on a daily basis to work on multiple websites, but when I try to work from home, my darned satellite internet has a latency of about 1000ms. (Its craptastic service, I know, but there are no alternatives where I live.) Thus, I was wondering if there is a way that I can connect to my web server and transfer files that can accomodate this latency.

FTP "works", but it communicates very very slowly, and its a nightmare with multiple files. It takes the connection about 10-15 seconds to start the transfer, and another 5 seconds after the transfer is done. The transfer itself goes very fast as expected, but the handshake process does not, as the server/client seem to need to do a lot of communication to negotiate the transfer. Worse, it seems to need to do this handshake thing for every individual file, which certainly doesn't help.

Is there any way I can modify my FTP to make it work better over a high latency connection? If not, are there any other protocols or transfer services I might be able to use that could handle such an issue? Its the main fault I find with my ISP, and there's not a lot I've been able to find that I can do about it...

Thanks

Answer 1

Sounds like a good case for using UDP rather than TCP-based protocols - e.g. uftp

A quote from the linked site: "especially useful for data distribution over a satellite link (with two way communication), where the inherent delay makes any TCP based communication terribly inefficient".

Answer 2

A few options:

• Sneaker-net. Use a USB key.
• SCP. I'm almost positive it'll only authenticate/handshake once.
• Tunnelling over SSH. The poor man's VPN. You'll be able to tunnel FTP or anything you like over the SSH connection. It'll be as fast as you're going to get and is very secure to boot.