I have a requirement to transfer some large (20GB) media files from desktop PCs to a remote FTP server. I need to authenticate the users using client certificates. Neither SFTP or FTP over SSH is an option. So I would like to do is something like:

• a Perl process runs inside apache as CGI or mod_perl. Cert auth is handled by apache itself before the perl code is started.
  
• The Perl process:
  
  • Opens an FTP connection to the remote host
    
  • Reads n bytes of base64 encoded data from the client HTTP connection (I don't want these files buffered to disk because they are so large)
    
  • base64::decode() the data, write it to the FTP connection.
    
  • rinse and repeat till the entire file is transferred, terminate the HTTP connection. Terminate the FTP connection.
    

So my questions:

• is this possible (I'm guessing yes):
  
  • Can you receive HTTP file transfers without them being saved to disk?
    
  • Can you upload data over FTP without it coming from disk?
    
• What would be the best modules for doing this?
  
• What are the scalability issues with something like this, I expect maybe a maximum of 50 concurrent uploads.
  
• What have I missed?
  

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