ftplib two server "proxy" support

[gcash]

Is there anyone who's done support for the 2 server model of the FTP
RFC-959, the thing that most UNIX FTP clients call "PROXY" ??

I'm talking about Figure 2 in Section 2.3 of RFC-959 and *NOT* a firewall
or other type of intermediate proxy.

This is where you open a control connection to 2 remote servers and command
one to send a file to the other one.  The normal FTP session looks
something like: (if the two servers are named "spam" and "eggs")

#> ftp spam
FTP> user joe
FTP> pass ######
FTP> proxy open eggs
FTP> proxy user bob
FTP> proxy pass #####

at this point you're logged into spam as "joe" and eggs as "bob".
now you can say:

FTP> bin
FTP> proxy bin
FTP> proxy get pythonmodule.c

and "pythonmodule.c" is transferred *by* *direct* *connection* from spam to
eggs.

You can also say things like:

FTP> proxy ls

and get a directory listing from eggs.

The reason I want this is because I'm transferring huge, simply enormous,
mindbogglingly big files and this cuts *way* down on the network traffic
that would happen if I simply opened connections to the two servers and
copied the files between them.  Plus the pipe between the servers is
relatively large.  And dammit, I can't put Python on either of the servers,
either!!

Please someone say they've done it, as I'm seriously not looking forward to
having to do it myself.

>From looking at the FTP client sources, I think I could also hack it by
opening connections to both servers, then sending the appropriate 'PORT'
command followed by a 'STOR' or 'RETR'

Any suggestions?

-gc

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