journal-30-3-11
I read section 2.3 of Computer Networking about FTP. It was interesting to see the difference between FTP and HTTP. HTTP, being stateless seems more like "Here's some information, this is what it is and what you should do with it" and there are no assumptions about what happens next. FTP reads more like a shell session with commands and instructions. I curious about SFTP. I understand SFTP is built on top of SSH which makes sense with the shell-like structure of FTP. Is SFTP just FTP clients mimicking the behavior of an FTP connection using what is actually an ssh connection? Is there another piece here?
Next I read 2.4 about email. SMTP seems to be a bit more like HTTP in terms of having discreet messages rather than an extended session. It was unclear from the reading exactly how attachments work. I would be interested to see this. I'm also somewhat interested in the differences between POP and IMAP as I understand IMAP seems to be gaining popularity over POP.
I then dove into the section 3 and TCP. It cool to see how much has to happen behind the scenes in order to accurately send a 5 kilobyte message that takes much less than a second. I'm thinking I'll want to read the RFC on TCP (I hear it has a great ASCII DFA).
