choosing secure file copying method?

[st3vie]

Hi ppl,

i was wondering about what to use for copying files from an internal dev webserver to an external live webserver.
Maybe someone could give some hints/tips?

Here is how things are basically setup:

• there are 4 environments, 2 internal (dev / testing) and 2 external (testing (accesible to customers) / live).
  
• Internally we use subversion which works fine, but what i was looking for is a secure and
  cpu cycle friendly way to copy files from the internal testing environment, to the external testing environment.
  
• it should be secure
  
• it should keep the permissions as they were
  
• The copying is done on user command, and not as cron job (but some might be added as a cron job in the future).

Right, those are the basics.

One of the requirements is that it is secure, so when reading about NFS it seems this is not an option. i believe NFS4
will have secure transfer, but it isn't stable yet.

Coda: it seemed a bit uncertain of itself, reading the website. Does anybody have experience with this? Is it good, stable,
worth trying?

RSync/SSH or RSyncd: i already read this thread about these options,
which helped already a bit. Seems RSync/SSH would be a good option.

SSH/SCP: we used this before in the old setup, and it worked, but are some of the other options perhaps better?

if anybody has any hints/tips about this, i'll be glad to hear them.
Any help is appreciated. And thanks for reading of course! =)

-st3vie

[Spiffster]

In my opinion it depends on whether you want to copy single files or synchronize an entire directory tree.

For single files, scp works fine, but for synchronizing a complete directory tree, rsync is your best bet. Of course you would probably want to use rsync over ssh. I am not sure if rsyncd has any encryption, but I think it would mostly be used in safe environments, or with anonymous access, so I doubt it.

So in your case I think rsync over ssh is the best solution.
_________________
Mikkel Holm Olsen
AKA Spaceman Spiff
http://symlink.dk

[kamikaze04]

I've got more or less the same needs as you. I use a simple solution

Midnight commander and making a visual ssh connection to the remote machine. I can surf through the remote and local tree and copy recursively all i want. It preserves permisssions...

Hope it will be usefull for you
_________________
Todo lo que quisiste saber sobre google en: www.noticiasgoogle.es

[st3vie]

thanks for the replies!

we will use a webtool that performs these tasks, so using MC won't be nessasary.
We also want to avoid those manual actions, since there are people that no less about
these things than others.

it seems we will probably have to do directories as well as single files, so maybe a combination
ssh/scp and rsync/ssh can be used. Like Spiffster said, scp for single files and rsync for directories.

thanks.
-st3vie