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zmodem is still very useful as you can use it with ssh

use zssh instead of ssh, then sz on the remote end to send files (and rz to receive)



I wrote a zmodem-like protocol many years ago called "sixpack" that worked through anything; I used it through two nested telnet connections going through two terminal servers (serial lines). Sixpack's wire format packs data into six bits, similarly to base64.

This was in 1996. In a fit of amazing fortuitousness, a fellow in Japan, almost exactly at the same time, developed a program called Modemu. It is still out there and has not been maintained since. What Modemu does is creaete a pseudo-tty device in your system that you can use in a program like Minicom. This pseudo-TTY device accepts AT commands to "dial" remote hosts and connect to them.

So at the time I was able to install my Sixpack commands (sps, spr) into Minicom, and then telnet out using Modemu: ATD<host-namne>, then transfer files to the remote hosts.

I would install the receive program by uuencoding it, and then just doing piece by piece copy and paste into the remote session to recover the binary.


I used it just last week. Thanks to a bad choice regarding kernel modules on Canonical's part I had an update to Ubuntu 22.04 on a Raspberry Pi leave the RPi inaccessible via Ethernet. Luckily I have the serial console on the RPi connected to another co-located device for exactly this potential situation. I was able to ssh to the other device, launch a serial terminal from there to the RPi and transfer the deb file needed to fix the problem directly to the RPi from my laptop via modem.


Is that for some kind of use-case where you can't use SCP?


Absolutely. On some boards where ethernet is not an option you can still run a serial getty and transfer files to / from the device.


Absolutely. I used a ton of "sz" when I had a dial-up shell account (and didn't yet know about SLiRP). More recently I've used sz/rz when I've been connected to a router w/ a serial connection and needed to pull down a file from a remote host. The router had an SSH client so I just connected to a Linux box, downloaded my file, then sz'd it to myself over the SSH connection via serial.


works through as many levels of ssh as you want, and much more convenient that having to open another terminal, figure out the cwd and run the command

years ago a load of GUI clients used to have a right click menu to send/receive files that used zmodem (sadly putty wasn't one of them)





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