Background
Recently, one of our customers reached out to us, asking how best to integrate Cerberus with a new backup system they were evaluating. This particular backup system would integrate well with their existing infrastructure, but it required a SCP feature that Cerberus did not support.
Secure Copy Protocol
SCP is an older and relatively simple protocol supported by many systems that need simple, secure file transfers. Unfortunately, the protocol is poorly documented, having no formal IETF RFC (Internet Engineering Task Force Request for Comments). This makes cross-systems integration difficult in many situations.
Despite the lack of standards, Cerberus has robust SCP support, and we continually improve our features as our customers need them. For example, in the past few months, we improved our compatibility with Cisco devices. However, in this case, the customer needed a feature that we didn’t support until now.
For this customer’s integration to work, the backup system needed to preserve the last modified timestamp. Cerberus has supported last modified and last accessed timestamps during download for a long time, but we did not support them during uploads.
To support this customer, we’ve implemented the “p flag” (the preserve option) in our SCP implementation. This preserves the last modified and last accessed timestamps when uploading files to Cerberus. You can test this with the following SCP commands:
scp -p source-file user@cerberusURL:/destination/
scp -p -r source-folder user@cerberusURL:/destination/
Providing stellar customer support is one of our core values. We’re always interested in hearing how you use Cerberus and what we can do to better support your needs. So please, reach out and let us know!
Availability
This improvement is available now in Cerberus FTP Server Professional and Enterprise editions 11.3.7 and beyond.