Nate On The Net

recent posts

Paranoia?

Seems that the programmers of the WS_FTP file transfer protocol client must be fans of the Paranoia role playing game. Note this unusual message buried in the WS_FTP transfer log during a routine FTP session.

PORT 192,168,2,225,11,146
200 PORT command successful
RETR adminapglacct.php
150-Connecting to port 2962
150-The computer is your friend. Trust the computer
150 4.4 kbytes to download
Received 4542 bytes in 0.1 secs, (440.00 Kbps), transfer succeeded
226-File successfully transferred
226 0.000 seconds (measured here), 32.06 Mbytes per second

Edit (22 September 2004@21:00:48): It occurs to me that it may be a certain *nix FTP daemon returning this code, not necessarily WS_FTP. At any rate, it’s still cool.

Posted in

4 responses to “Paranoia?”

  1. Brian Avatar
    Brian

    Heh. Nifty. Paranoia just got rereleased in a new edition, by the way, as Paranoia XP from Mongoose.

    Like

    Reply
  2. Davin Avatar
    Davin

    I just ran into that too! For reference, the daemon in question is pureftpd…and it doesn’t happen every time you issue a RETR either. It’s an easter egg that rarely pops up as far as I can tell.

    http://www.pureftpd.org/

    Like

    Reply
  3. Mark S. Avatar
    Mark S.

    Heh, I ran into that too while I was copying 8mb worth of stuff off my website onto my computer :p

    I think it pops up at a certain time, like every 5 minutes.

    Like

    Reply
  4. mf Avatar
    mf

    It happens when a file transfers in under 1 second. As you can see from your log:

    226-File successfully transferred
    226 0.000 seconds (measured here), 32.06 Mbytes per second

    The same I get on my pure-ftpd if the file takes less than a second to transfer:

    [L] 226 0.028 seconds (measured here), 2.55 Mbytes per second
    Transferred: VTS_02_0.IFO 72 KB in 0.16 seconds (461.5 KB/s)
    [L] PASV
    [L] 227 Entering Passive Mode (192,168,1,151,48,200)
    [L] Opening data connection IP: 192.168.1.151 PORT: 12488
    [L] RETR VTS_02_0.VOB
    [L] 150-Accepted data connection
    [L] 150-The computer is your friend. Trust the computer

    Like

    Reply

Leave a reply to Brian Cancel reply