Dolphin/Konqueror
Dolphin and konqueror are 2 powerful file managers available for the KDE desktop on linux. Both of them support accessing remote file systems over protocols like ftp.
So if you want to access the files on your server over ftp simply type
ftp://[email protected]_or_ip
It will then ask for the password and open the remote file system like a local file system. The user can navigate and work with the files very easily.
Use SSH protocol to browse files
Ssh is a protocol to manage remote systems over the terminal. There is a related command called scp that can be used to copy file across the remote and local system from the terminal. However when it comes to moving files, its a lot easier with a gui interface like a file browser.
So instead of scp, we can right away use ssh protocol inside dolphin and konqueror just like ftp. The url will be like this
fish://[email protected]_name_or_ip
It will then ask for the password and will then open the remote file system just like ftp.
Fish stands for File transfer over SSH (File transfer over shell protocol).
And it can be used very much like ftp. Read the wikipedia article for more information.
Ftp clients like gftp also support using ssh for file transfer.
By using ssh for both terminal access and file access, you can avoid installing a separate ftp server. Ftp is not secure as it transmits data in plain text format unless using SSL encryptiong
It should be noted that Fish is not "Ftp over SSH".
Use SFTP to browse files
Along with the FISH protocol, the same OpenSSH server provides another great service for file transfer, called SFTP. The usage is same as FISH and it allows for remote file system management just like FTP.
To connect to the server over SFTP just change the protocol of the url
sftp://[email protected]_name_or_ip
Simple as that.
If the key of the remote server already exists in the ~/.ssh/known_hosts file then dolphin/konqueror might give an error like this
The host key for this server was not found, but another type of key exists. An attacker might change the default server key to confuse your client into thinking the key does not exist. Please contact your system administrator.
To fix this, first remove the key from the known_hosts file using the ssh-keygen command
$ ssh-keygen -R example.com
This will remove the ssh key for example.com that was saved earlier. Now try connecting with sftp and it shall prompt again to save the key file and will work fine.
The possibility in Dolphin to do file transfer to another PC was unknown for me, but it great and handy tool.
Fist establish the LAN connection by a switch or cross cable between the two Linux PC.
Test the communication between the two PC by pinging the IP adresses, for example 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2.
Then install the openssh-server op both PC’s!
Then in Dophin add a new item below network in the left part of the screen and add “fish://[email protected]”
You will prompted to type the password for the target PC were the files will be copied.
With the split screen you can drag and drop the files to the target PC
very helpful!!
Oddity I just found: adding keys to ssh-agent, and configuring hosts in ~/.ssh/config gets dolphin to use this info for sftp but not for fish. :-/
wasn’t aware of “fish” syntax in dolphin. thanks a lot. very helpful