FTP Server Easter Eggs

I've recently being working on integrating FTP into our CopyTools application. As a result of this, I have been staring at quite a lot at FTP logs as the various tests and processes do their work.

This morning I was running the CopyTools GUI client watching the progress bar climb upwards as I was putting the support through it's final paces. At the same time, the output from the FTP commands were being printed to the debug log. I was idly watching that too, when all of a sudden the following entries appeared

PASV
227 Entering Passive Mode (91,208,99,4,171,236)
RETR /cyowcopy/images/regexedit_thumb.png
150-Accepted data connection
150-The computer is your friend. Trust the computer
150 58.2 kbytes to download
226-File successfully transferred
226 0.060 seconds (measured here), 0.95 Mbytes per second

At first glance, that might appear to be perfectly normal FTP input/output, but have a look at line 5

150-The computer is your friend. Trust the computer

That was... unexpected, I haven't seen a message like that appear before. The FTP server I've been testing with identifies itself as PureFTP; I have no idea if it's an egg only in that particular server or if other servers do it too. While I haven't read the FTP RFC's in great details, I'm fairly sure they don't make mention of that!

I wonder how many Easter eggs are built into software we've been using for years without ever noticing? And while I'm probably very late to the party for noticing this egg, it's pretty cool that they are still out there and software can have some humour while going about thankless dull tasks.

Update History

• 2016-11-05 - First published
• 2020-11-21 - Updated formatting

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