Mat Schaffer wrote:
> On Aug 17, 2006, at 10:24 PM, Hal Fulton wrote:
>> I'm rather ignorant of SSL and ssh... but I'm wishing
>> for a "compatibility" layer of some kind so that I
>> could use the old telnet and ftp interfaces (which I
>> know) but do it securely.
>>
>> In other words, something like:
>>
>>   require 'ssh-compat'
>>
>>   SSH::Compat.setup(*whatever) do
>>     # ...whatever...
>>   end
>>
>>   # Now just use Net::FTP and Net::Telnet
>>   # "just as if" they were the originals
>>
>>   # Blah blah blah...
>>   # all legacy code remains unchanged
>>
>>   SSH::Compat.quit    # I don't mind some "teardown"
>>                       # if it's needed
>>
>>
>> Is this practical/reasonable?
>>
>> Or is it Just As Easy to use the real secure ftp
>> and ssh stuff?
> 
> I have no experience on this either way.  But it seems like you could 
> implement this using SSH to establish a tunnel into a remote machine 
> then go local to telnet/ftp assuming they were running on the box.
> 
> The implementation you're hinting at would lend itself really well to 
> ssh tunneling, I think.  But I'm sure other people have much more 
> enlightened ideas.
> 
> -Mat
> 

Why bother?  ssh, sftp, scp are no harder to use than telnet, ftp.  What 
OS are you using?  For GNU/Linux + other Unix can use gftp as a gui 
client to handle sftp and scp.

And can use any ssh client for machine access.  Putty is cross-platform:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/