Secure FTP and SSL/TLS
OK, I've become a little more educated today about yet another way for ftp to be transported. It turns out that sftp uses OpenSSH as the transport mechanism whereas ftp on SSL/TLS simply uses OpenSSL. Interesting, but a pain in the rear as I'm trying to find a way to upload changes to my Comcast web pages without using clear-text passwords. In it's infinite wisdom, Comcast has decided to use the SSL/TLS form of securing FTP, and for Windows users, that's probably just fine. But I'm on Mac OS X, and there aren't a lot of SSL/TLS clients out there.
In fact, a Google search said that several clients for Mac OS X were capable of dealing with SSL/TLS, but when I tried them I was unable to get any of them to work with the Comcase upload site. Now there's certainly a possibility that the port number I'm using is wrong. In one client it allowed me to set the port number but defaulted to 990. Interestingly, there's no mention of a port number on the Comcast web site for SSL/TLS. Why should there be?
So I'm left with the email I sent to Panic.com - makers of Transmit, the ftp client that I like to use (and have purchased) for Mac OS X, and we'll see if they come back with anything helpful to try. One source listed Transmit as an ftp client that did SSL/TLS, but I've yet to be able to prove that with the program in hand.