Code Challenge: Direct file upload from user to SFTP server "through" Web server

[klktrk]

Hello, this one has me stumped.

I am writing a PHP application which requires HUGE files to be uploaded to an Akamai server. The obvious way to do this is to just use cURL or the built-in PHP FTP functions to upload the file to a temp directory on the Web server and then upload them to the Akamai host. However, we don't have enough room on our PHP server to have 1gb size files laying around so I want to see if there's a way for the PHP application to "broker" a transaction directly from the user's desktop to the Akamai servers. further, we need this to be secure, so it would have to use SFTP or SCP.

I thought of using cURL to establish an upload stream, and then another process would just look for data in that stream and pass it on to Akamai, but this feels exceedingly "brittle". Pipes and streams are not the most robust things around and often close down unexpectedly--especially during a 1gb transfer of data.

Has anyone ever done this? Any shortcuts, or hints as to what direction I should look?

Thanks.

[crazychris]

maybe do it in 'packets' where the file is chopped up into 1MB blocks and sent with flag as to which part it is, then once all the bits are in, push them together. Missing parts can be retransmitted quickly rather than doing the while thing again.