Local File Transfers

I've been in this confusion for long time. How you should transfer your files in local area network is often painful thing to think about (or to do so).

My confusion starts when I was using my EZX phone, as it runs (GNU/)Linux it is (possibly) having ftpd, sshd, smbd on it at the same time.

The widely-used smbd was my liking, but before cifs fully implemented in my boxes. I can't anymore mount the share as it prefers cifs over smb. I once used lite configured (pro)ftpd to transfer movies to my phone to watch, but it was all pain. Then, until now I use smbclient to transfer files to my phone, despite sometimes it still throws silly errors.

Even more confusion's happened in transferring between boxes (and laptops) in lab (which I am lately accepted to join). The connection is still in fastethernet, so it won't bug me to have dedicated ftpd on them. Using Samba is surely a good idea.

The (likely to be) same pain is just growing again, the problem is still around cifs/smb issue. Arghr... I've lost the words to say how frustrating it is. I prefer doing file transfer between (GNU/)Linux equipped boxes with sftp(ftpover ssh), and transferring files between Windows boxes or Linux-Windows with SMB. But it's still not enough.

What I want is single reliable protocol, which would allow me to hit gigabit ethernet full-duplex (if the lab will take an upgrade on its networking devices), which works on multiple different OSs, and of course easy-peasy one.