Abstract: The Globus Toolkit’s GridFTP code base has become the de facto standard for data movement within “Grid” projects, and is in use in the vast majority of such projects in the US and abroad. These projects appreciate GridFTP’s integration with the public key infrastructure (PKI)-based Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI), as well as its implementation of the fast, efficient, and robust GridFTP data transport protocol. Another important user community for GridFTP comprises networking researchers and others interested in using GridFTP for a limited amount of time, in non-production, low risk scenarios—for example, as part of research projects exploring new network protocols. For this user community, GridFTP’s reliance on GSI can represent a time investment that is not justified, due to the associated need to establish, configure, and manage an appropriate PKI. Thus, this community has expressed a strong interest in seeing extensions to GridFTP that would allow for alternative security solutions. Motivated by these requests, we have developed what is called GridFTP-Lite that uses a SSH based authentication mechanism.

Installation instructions for GridFTP-Lite:
Do the following on both the client and server nodes:
1. Obtain the source or binary installer from the Globus page
2. untar the installer
3. cd to the installer directory
4. ./configure --prefix /path/to/install
5. make gridftp
6. set environment variable GLOBUS_LOCATION to /path/to/install
7. source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.(c)sh

Do the following on the server node:
1. $GLOBUS_LOCATION/setup/globus/setup-globus-gridftp-sshftp -server

Now you can run do data transfers using any of the following client command:

To move a file from client to server
globus-url-copy /path/to/local/file sshftp://server/path/to/remote/file

To move a file from server to client
globus-url-copy sshftp://server/path/to/remote/file /path/to/local/file

To move a file between 2 servers
globus-url-copy sshftp://server1/path/to/remote/file sshftp://server2/path/to/remote/file