Steven Rose wrote:
mbm wrote:
If you have ssh access to this machine and just want to send a couple of files back home, why do you want to use SMTP as the file transport mechanism?
Indeed, makes little sense to use SMTP when SSH is available.
Indeed, I do use scp a lot in these situations.
However, there is one situation which has occurred recently where this was not possible/easy.
I have a box on a site where the only access I have to it is to join a VPN, use it to connect via VNC to a Windows PC from which I use PuTTY to connect to the box. The Windows box is "secured" (I use that term advisedly :-) and I can't install anything else on it or transfer files from it (in any way I've found so far - I can't even open Windows Explorer on it). However the box does have Internet access and I could scp to an Internet facing server and then pull it down to my PC via scp, but that's messy.
The file I need to get is only a few kB in size so email is sensible. In many cases I am connecting to the box to get a file to subsequently email on to someone else anyway, so it would make sense to email from the box rather than jump through hoops in order to email it from my desktop.
I've also been in situations where I am on site and want to send a file home; again scp is not an option unless using the 2-step approach.
In all of these cases scp does provide a workaround but the "simplest" option would be to email the file home from the server.