The project that I am working on right now requires a script/program to connect to a remote server and initiate an FTP from that server to yet another server. We have a central server that we would like to run all of our scripts and cron jobs from. The file that needs to be transferred, however, must originate from a separate machine. Is there a way that I can do this?

Something like:
Cron job on server A connects to server B
Server B then runs a script to grab a file
Server B then FTP's file to server C

What's the easiest way to do this? Can the connection from A to B be encrypted (ssh?)?

Thanks

You can do it this way: script from machine A uses ssh to conect to B and uses ftp to upload a file to C. If you configure ssh to use public-private keys (with no password need) it'd be quite easy in a script.

(mistake: quote instead of edit...)

to further what Mara said, you can execute a command through ssh. for example:

ssh user@SERVERB '(cd /etc; cat fstab)'

will ssh in, do the stuff in quotes, and log out. So... if you setup public key authentication, from server A, you coud simply:

ssh SERVERB 'ncftpput -u user -p passwd -S .tmp -V -m SERVERC dest_dir file'

assuming "file" lives on SERVERB. If it doesn't, you can tar over ssh as well, and in the same ssh session as the untar, you could execute the ncftpput command

There are other alternatives to ncftpput... I believe there's ftpupload (Debian based) and... well, I'm sure several others.

edit: I'll go ahead and give you the tar command in case you need it - it would be something like (assuming the script and file were on SERVERA:

tar cf - file | ssh user@SERVERB '(cd /some_dir; tar xf -; ncftpput -options SERVERC dest_dir file)'

Wow, thanks for all the help. That should work perfectly.

That tar command was pretty slick too.

Thanks!