IT-ops, please make our lives *easier* not harder

This is a call to all IT operators around the world, there are basics things you can do to help users more satisfied.

I need to upload a branch of files (3326 files for 40MB in total) so that they can be available online. The only access i have been given is a FTP account. Doh !

It means that if i successfully login, the whole process will take about 1:15 (and that's the estimated remaining time at the time of writing after 21 files uploaded and about 5 minutes) to deal with the quantity of files (Size doesn't always matter).

If i had an SSH account, i would 'tgz' the file then 'scp' it on the machine for extraction. Total file size: 2.4MB (Those are just text files) total time estimated by myself, about 5 minutes in total. (By the way now, the estimated remaining time is 1h29, 28 files are already there !)

Anyway, maybe there are better clients than the one i use (i use the Nautilus stuff, since gFTP always break when you try to upload more than a couple hundred files at once), if you know any that works well on Linux let me know (and recursively).

Earlier i said "Successfully login", because for some reasons, sometimes IT-ops like to make your life a bit harder. I had a great "thomas.heute" username, my life was great, i could go on ftp://thomas.heute@foo.bar and copy/paste my stuff. Easy. Same for the password manager "Revelation" it could log me in directly. For no reason and no warning, my username suddenly changed to "thomas.heute@jboss.org". Not a big deal it i just have to type more letters, but now, if you try to go to ftp://thomas.heute@jboss.org@foo.bar several FTP clients i tried get confused. Again the fault can be put on the FTP clients, they should parse on the last '@' not the first.

Anyway with that change, i had to go back looking at the corresponding hexadecimal value for '@' which is '40' and now i can login with: ftp://thomas.heute%40jboss.org@foo.bar. Note that it would be the same for SSH access.

So 2 lessons to not piss your user base:
1) Give them a username that they can easily use, no '@', i don't see the point. If you need a context then delimate it with something safer like '_'.
2) Give them an access which is relevant with the usage they are doing of the server. FTP sucks at handling many files.

Now that i finished this blog entry, 63 files out of 3326 are uploaded the estimated remaining time is 3:11:42 and i have more to upload after that... I'm gonna try another client that maybe can handle the FTP connections in a better way