Install uftp with Homebrew, apt, Nix, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• uftp
• uftp_keymgt
• uftpd
• uftpproxyd

Project history

UFTP is hosted on SourceForge and has a long public release table spanning older 3.x and 4.x lines through the current 5.x line. The 5.x documentation set includes protocol details, server usage, client usage, proxy usage, and key-management utility usage.

The project is more than a single sender binary. The installed suite includes a server, client daemon, proxy daemon, and key-management utility, reflecting the protocol's focus on large fan-out transfers, encryption setup, retransmission, and proxy aggregation.

Adoption history

The official description is unusually specific about adoption niche: UFTP is useful when the same large file must reach many receivers, and particularly useful across satellite links with two-way communication. That points to broadcast-style and high-latency distribution environments rather than ordinary one-to-one FTP replacement.

The package-manager metadata shows UFTP available through Homebrew, Debian, Nix, Ubuntu, and openSUSE naming. That distribution footprint fits a specialized networking tool that operators may want to install on both senders and receivers without building from source.

How it is used

A UFTP session has announce/register, file-transfer, and completion/confirmation phases. The protocol sends file data as UDP blocks, lets clients report missing blocks with NAKs, and has the server retransmit the missing data.

The server command sends one or more files to one or more receivers via multicast with optional encryption. The documentation exposes operational controls for transmission rate, buffers, multicast TTL, DSCP, encryption algorithms, host lists, proxies, restart files, and logging.

UFTP also supports proxy servers for disjoint networks, NAT traversal, multicast tunneling, and response aggregation, which is central to scaling sender/receiver communication.

Why package nerds care

For package nerds, UFTP is the rare maintained command-line multicast transfer suite. It packages protocol machinery that would otherwise require bespoke operations code: sender, receiver daemon, proxy, key management, OpenSSL/CNG integration, and cross-platform builds.

Its release table and compatibility notes make it useful to distributions because deployments can mix clients, servers, and proxies across versions. The official page notes that version 5.x clients and proxies are backward compatible with 4.x servers.

Timeline

• 2010-03-11: UFTP 3.0 release listed on the official download table.
• 2013-04-27: UFTP 4.0 release listed on the official download table.
• 2020-04-22: UFTP 5.0 release listed on the official download table.
• 2023-12-17: UFTP 5.0.3 release and last site update listed on the official page.

Related projects

• The UFTP protocol documentation references TFMCC/RFC 4654 for congestion control and TLS 1.3/RFC 8446 concepts for key exchange and encryption setup.
• The suite includes `uftp`, `uftpd`, `uftpproxyd`, and `uftp_keymgt` as related command-line programs.

Sources

• https://uftp-multicast.sourceforge.net/ describes the project, satellite-link use case, proxy support, documentation set, platform support, releases, and 5.x/4.x compatibility note.
• https://uftp-multicast.sourceforge.net/protocol.txt documents session phases, retransmission, proxies, congestion control, and encryption setup.
• https://uftp-multicast.sourceforge.net/server_usage.txt documents server command behavior and operational options.
• source_facts.package-manager lists Homebrew, Debian, Nix, Ubuntu, and openSUSE package names.