LinDesk

As a web developer good FTP clients are a necessity for me. I have to upload the scripts to the server. I used to use gFTP for this. Good client - clean interface, easy to use. But not as powerful as I wanted. Then I found FireFTP - the extension for Firefox - it is a good client. But recently I found that my favorite application, Konqueror, can do it much better than all the other clients.

Didn’t know konqueror could be used as a FTP client? Just copy and paste this FTP URL into the address bar of Konqueror and see for yourself…
ftp://checksoftware.com/

Advantages

The main advantage of using Konqueror as the FTP client is that you are very familiar with it. All the shortcuts, the tricks, you use when browsing through your files are available when you connect to a remote server as well. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V? The FTP client has got it. What if you want to browse two folders in the remote server at the same time? Konqueror can do it.

2 Pane View

Like many other FTP Clients, you can split Konqueror into two panes(Window->Split View Left and Right). This is perhaps the best way to use Konqueror as an FTP Client.

X Pane View

Unlike other FTP Clients, Konqueror goes further than just 2 panes. You can keep on splitting a window to make it ‘just perfect’ for you.

Tabbed View

If paned view is not enough, just open up a new tab - and continue splitting it.

Multiple Protocols - FTP/SFTP/FISH

Konqueror supports many protocols - among which these three are the most important to us…

fish

You can use fish if you have a shell account on the remote server. For example, fish://admin@linkdesk.com would open a connection for user binnyva to a remote server ‘linkdesk.com’.

ftp

File Transfer Protocol - you should be knowing this if you have come this far

sftp

Secure FTP.

Problems

So far I have found only one issue with it - I was not able to configure Konqueror to act as an FTP client properly when I was behind a proxy. I have reasons to believe that it was my fault - but I did spend some time trying. Could someone else confirm this?

Conclusion

Konqueror is the best FTP Client there is. Period.

Back in the days when I was working in a web development company, I had to ssh into some sites for setting up crons, importing database dumps etc. But there was a problem - my system was behind a proxy. And SSH did not have an option to connect through a proxy.

To use ssh over a proxy connection, you need a software called Cocrkscrew. Download the source and compile/install it.

Installation

wget http://www.agroman.net/corkscrew/corkscrew-2.0.tar.gz
tar -xzf corkscrew-2.0.tar.gz
cd corkscrew-2.0
./configure
make
su
[Enter Password]
make install

Configuration

Open the file ~/.ssh/config

Add this line..

ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/corkscrew <proxy_server_ip> <proxy_server_port> %h %p

Example…

ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/corkscrew 192.168.1.15 80 %h %p

Here 192.168.1.15 is the proxy server and 80 is the port.

After this is done, just connect to the remote server using ssh.

ssh google.com