FTP Question

I have been tasked with researching the capabilities of the as400 FTP
client. We are at v4r5 currently. I am a web developer, and have not had any
experience with the as400, so forgive me if I sound ignorant.

My focus is on how to establish a secure connection from the as400 FTP
client to the secure FTP server, which will be on a Win2K box.

I encountered several articles about v5r1 having a secure server, but not an
inherently secure client. Here's an excerpt from the article:

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Secure FTP is different from other TCP/IP servers, such as Telnet or HTTP.
Those servers always have two different ports — one for secure transactions
and the other for nonsecure transactions. Although FTP has a nonsecure port
(port 21) and a secure port (port 990), the FTP protocol lets you make a
connection on the nonsecure port and then send commands that initiate a
secure session(1). The iSeries FTP server supports both methods of
initiating secure FTP sessions.

Configuring FTP Clients

Now that the FTP server has been configured, you must configure an FTP
client. This presents a limitation with the iSeries secure FTP
implementation: the iSeries FTP client isn't SSL-enabled in V5R1(2). While
IBM realizes this is a requirement, it hasn't indicated when it will add
this important feature. This means you can't perform secure FTP transactions
between two iSeries. However, you can conduct secure transactions between
your iSeries and any other FTP client enabled for SSL. FTP clients are
available for NT servers and Unix systems, as well as for your desktop. Two
SSL-enabled desktop clients are WS_FTP Pro 6.6 from Ipswitch, Inc.,
http://www.ipswitch.com, and BlueZone Secure FTP from Seagull Software,
http://www.renex.com/products/bzftp (formerly from Renex).

While the lack of an iSeries SSL-enabled FTP client will limit who can take
advantage of the SSL-enabled FTP server in V5R1, there are many situations
in which the server can help improve security at your site. For example,
users can access this feature to provide secure data transmission between an
NT Web server and iSeries containing corporate or production data. Other
possibilities are to use the feature to provide secure download facilities
from an iSeries Web site and to use the client-side authentication feature
to restrict which vendors are allowed to FTP to or from an iSeries.
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So, am I correct in deducing that I cannot transfer files securely from the
as400 to my web server?

If that is true, then are their encryption algorithms with public/private
keys that work on win2k platform?

Is the FTP client on v4r5 SSL-enabled (my assumption is it is not)?

Thanks for the help. I appreciate your time.

Thanks,


Nathan Steiner
Palm Harbor Homes
Web Applications Developer
972.991.3332 x504
Help Desk 888.274.8324
nsteiner@palmharbor.com