File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a time-honored method of transferring files to and from a remote network site. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and uses separate control and data connections between the client and server applications. The FTP client connects to the FTP server, and enables the user to send and retrieves files from that server.

FTP is one of many different file transfer protocols that are used. Other examples include the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), BitTorrent, the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), and Secure Copy (SCP).

In recent years, FTP’s popularity for general downloading files has declined. Linux distributions and software are now often downloaded by using direct downloads using a web browser, by BitTorrent, metalink, or by using a download utility. FTP is often tucked away as a download option even if it is available. While FTP can cause bandwidth problems it nevertheless remains a great way of moving large files.

The downside to using FTP is that it doesn’t necessarily take internet security risks into account. SFTP, the more advanced version of the same technology, enables you to manage files on your server just like FTP does. However, it uses a previously-established Secure Shell (SSH) connection to maintain the safety of your files and the site as a whole.

An FTP server is a software application which enables the transfer of files from one computer to another. Here’s our recommendations.

At the heart of OpenStack, as with many open source projects, is a thriving community. Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director at the newly renamed Open Infrastructure Foundation which sits behind OpenStack, feels this is it’s finest work. “OpenStack’s greatest achievement is our community – a growing group of diverse contributors, users, and vendors who have enabled OpenStack to be one of the top three most active open source projects, in addition to Linux and Chromium.”

And while not always seen as being ‘mainstream tech’, the numbers are staggering. Bryce continued: “Over 100,000 individuals from 187 countries continue to support a project that is running over 10 million cores in production, powering critical infrastructure like banks, telecoms, railroads, retailers, hospitals, and more. I am so proud of the work that our community puts in daily to keep the world running on OpenStack.”

One of the biggest issues any technology can experience is scalability. Growing fast enough to suit demand, but also ensuring that the tech can deliver consistent quality as it does so. But these views of community – and its growth – are echoed by Georgi Georgiev, CIO of Japan’s SBI Bits: “Finding the appropriate technologies to build a virtual environment is a challenge of its own. OpenStack solved this problem by putting together a great stack of projects, and more impressively, built a community around it to support. This is the best that could have happened for open source, with OpenStack being available freely to everyone, while also enabling companies to package it up and sell while improving the product together.”

Talking of growing fast, OpenStack’s complimentary nature as a companion to the ever scalable public cloud provides organisations with the best of both worlds according to Tytus Kurek, Product Manager, at Canonical: “Although public clouds have almost dominated the cloud computing market, OpenStack adoption continues to grow every year. This is because OpenStack continues to deliver a cost-effective extension to the public cloud infrastructure, allowing organisations to take control over their budget. As one of the biggest contributors to the OpenStack project, Canonical is looking forward to seeing what the next 10 years will bring.”

Also: Why Linux Should Factor Into Your Security Strategy

Cockpit is a service for Linux that provides a web-based interface for managing and monitoring hosts. It can be deployed in any size organization, even a small office, and it's a great way for home users to maintain the family IT infrastructure. I use it to manage and monitor all of the computers in my house—including Raspberry Pi.

Cockpit is a free and open source software project released under the LGPL v2.1+. It is sponsored by Red Hat and included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the RHEL Web Console.

• Exploring ROS 2 with Kubernetes | Ubuntu

  Kubernetes provides many critical attributes that can contribute to a robust robotics platform: isolated workloads, automated deployments, self-configuring work processes, and an infrastructure that is both declarative and immutable. However, robots designed with ROS 2 face challenges in setting up individual components on Kubernetes so that all parts smoothly work together. In this blog series, we construct a prototype ROS 2 system distributed across multiple computers using Kubernetes. Our goal is not only to provide you with a working configuration, but also to help you understand why it succeeds and overcome future design challenges.

  Getting into Kubernetes can be a pretty steep learning curve, so our prototype will use MicroK8s to make it easy. MicroK8s is a lightweight pure-upstream Kubernetes distribution and offers low-touch, self-healing, highly-available clusters. Its low resource footprint makes it ideal for running on robot computers. Even with very little Kubernetes experience you’ll quickly have a complete cluster up and running.

  This article will introduce some of the core concepts for our prototype design. Follow-on articles instantiate a ROS 2 talker/listener prototype on a single computer, then extend the prototype with alternative options and distributing compute across multiple computers.

  [...]

  Within a single pod, containers can reach each other on the localhost address (127.0.0.1), and the host machine’s loopback interface is attached to each container. However, since all pods use the same actual interface, they must coordinate port usage so that no two pods communicate using the same port at the same time.

  Should multiple containers within a single pod listen on the same port (for example, identical containers all hosting a web server on port 80), a Kubernetes service can be defined to expose the application and route incoming to containers. However, Kubernetes services typically perform port or address translation which, as we discussed earlier, interferes with ROS 2 communications. Kubernetes services cannot be used for ROS 2 network traffic.

  Additionally, ROS 2 does not provide a method for managing ports used by RTPS. For example, a container can not change the standard RTPS discovery port of 7400, nor can a ROS 2 listener select a port other than its default. As a result, port usage can not be coordinated across multiple ROS 2 containers running in the same pod, and these containers generally will not be able to communicate.

• How Kubernetes is transforming the industrial edge | Ubuntu

  In recent years, various platforms have emerged to support agile digital factory DevOps, but most industrial edge platforms have been held back by limitations to application scaling and management – and this is where Kubernetes at the edge comes in.

  Kubernetes is a container orchestration system. Containers make it possible to manage applications independently from their underlying technologies, and since factories are often highly heterogeneous environments, this independence is invaluable. Kubernetes simplifies matters even further by enabling an automated approach to scaling and managing large numbers of containerised applications across distributed infrastructure.

  Kubernetes is already well-established in the cloud arena, and the PAC RADAR report anticipates that it will soon gain traction at the industrial edge as organisations increasingly look to leverage cloud agility within their IoT environments. As the report explains: “Thanks to the latest innovations in the cloud world, we can predict quite easily what the next wave of ‘cloud-native’ innovations will bring to the industrial edge (and the data center). Kubernetes will be the next big thing at the edge, as it already is in the cloud.”

  In this respect, Canonical is ahead of the curve. MicroK8s is a fully containerised, lightweight, fast, and secure Kubernetes distribution optimised for edge and IoT production environments. As the report notes, MicroK8s has already reached 3,750 stars on GitHub – clearly demonstrating both its popularity and the developer appetite for Kubernetes at the edge. Additionally, MicroK8s offers a zero-ops experience, eliminating the main drawback to Kubernetes-based solutions identified in the report: complexity.

  Another advantage of Kubernetes is that it is multi-cloud, meaning it can integrate with cloud infrastructure across providers to enable further scalability beyond the edge. According to the report, this is another area in which Canonical excels thanks to Charmed Kubernetes: a composable Kubernetes distribution that can run on bare metal, VMware, Openstack and all major public clouds.