Robert Henderson <hender@AMES-NAS.ARPA> (02/01/85)
There is more than one "novice" out in net-land who would like to learn more about FTP. Would someone publish general info to the net. Specifically about obtaining some of the sources you read about. bob henderson NASA-Ames hender@AMES-NAS.ARPA
Martin Fouts <fouts@AMES-NAS.ARPA> (02/01/85)
The general ftp discussion really doesn't belong on this mailing
list. However, you are directed to see your local ftp guru or peruse
documentation available online at the nic.
If your only intent is to be a user of ftp, the manual page is
sufficent to get you started. If you wish to read general information
about internet protocols then A. S. Tannenbaum's book: "Computer
Networks" is recommended.
If you are interested in details of specific protocols, there are
a series of documents available online at the nic, called rfcs. To get
started reading rfcs, you should first get a copy of rfc 880 which is a
list of all of the rfcs relevent to protocols and rfc 899 which is an
index to the preceding 100 rfcs.
A template for doing this under 4.2bsd:
ftp nic
anonymous
guest
get <rfc>rfc880.txt rfc880
get <rfc>rfc899.txt rfc899
quit
Since you are on one of the ames-nas machines, you can log into amelia
and use a different procedure. The text for any rfc may be obtained by
typing the command
rfc NNN
where NNN is the rfc number.
marty
----------emks@uokvax.UUCP (02/06/85)
/***** uokvax:net.unix / brl-tgr!fouts / 1:12 pm Feb 1, 1985 */
The general ftp discussion really doesn't belong on this mailing
list. However, you are directed to see your local ftp guru or peruse
documentation available online at the nic.
marty
/* ---------- */
Then where does the discussion belong? The guidelines provided in the
most recent edition of the recurring publication "List of Active Newsgroups"
in mod.newslists says that this is a UNIX* neophytes group.
I agree that one should look at the documentation, what documentation there
is... I'm not satisfied with the documentation. I can see where someone
who isn't familiar with ipc might not understand what it does. Someone
wrote in here a while back something like "I'm on a uucp-only site...can
I ftp to someplace like <some sitename>??" I think that this is a reasonable
question, which the documentation *should* answer in non-computerese, but
doesn't.
kurt
"socket: EHOSTUNREACH"Martin Fouts <fouts@AMES-NAS.ARPA> (02/12/85)
My comment is known as open mouth, insert foot, jump. I didn't look at the original address of the comment, and assumed it had been sent to Unix-wizards, not info-unix. (Our local mail munger distributes both lists through the same alias.) However, I still stand by my comment that you should read the manual first, experiment second, find a local guru third, then try a mailing list. Marty ----------
guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) (02/12/85)
> > The general ftp discussion really doesn't belong on this mailing > > list. However, you are directed to see your local ftp guru or peruse > > documentation available online at the nic. > > Then where does the discussion belong? The guidelines provided in the > most recent edition of the recurring publication "List of Active Newsgroups" > in mod.newslists says that this is a UNIX* neophytes group. Unfortunately, "this" is two things; it's a UNIX neophytes group for USENET (net.unix), and it's a UNIX neophytes mailing list for the ARPANET (INFO-UNIX), which happen to be gatewayed to one another. The references to a "local FTP guru" and to the NIC are all well and good (sort of) for INFO-UNIX, but could be useless for most readers of "net.unix". > Someone wrote in here a while back something like "I'm on a uucp-only > site...can I ftp to someplace like <some sitename>??" I think that > this is a reasonable question, which the documentation *should* answer > in non-computerese, but doesn't. It's not clear whether the FTP documentation should tell the user that ARPANET sites are accessible only from ARPANET sites (replace "ARPANET" with "Internet" if appropriate). The best place to put things like this is in the articles/documentation for new users of USENET, and in whatever similar things exist for ARPANET mailing list recipients. The crux of the biscuit here is that we have several independent communities reading net.unix/INFO-UNIX; what is perfectly straightforward for one community may not mean anything to the other community. The user who triggered this whole discussion really *wanted* to ask the same question you mention, but didn't know enough to ask it. (It's sort of like the people who ask questions about "context diffs" and get answered with "use 'diff -c'"; a perfectly legitimate answer, but only if the person being answered is running the Berkeley version of "diff".) (BTW, for the benefit of people out there, the answer to the question "can I FTP to some place like <some sitename>" is probably "no", unless your site is on the ARPANET/Internet. You'll have to ask somebody who *is* on the ARPANET to do it for you.) Guy Harris {seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy
richards@uiucdcsb.UUCP (02/17/85)
What you are looking for depends on what you want to know about FTP. If you
are interested in the user level interface, you need to find a document
that is specific to your implementation (such as the "man" page for ftp(1)
for 4.2 BSD Unix, or it's equivalent for Tops-20, etc).
If you are interested in the underlying protocol and capabilities, you are
looking for a document called "RFC-765" (Request-for-comment) written by
John Postel, called "File Transfer Protocol", circa June 1980. It is available
from the Network Information Center, either by anonymous FTP (chicken-and-egg
problem here, eh?) as file <RFC>RFC765.TXT, or by mailing a request to
NIC@SRI-NIC.ARPA. They also publish an index to all the RFCs available.
For most references to using FTP to access files, you have to be connected
via a network (or connected networks) supporting the "internet" protocols
(TCP and IP) to the remote host. The best known instance of this is the
ARPAnet, although any local area network running 4.2BSD Unix also supports
this mode of communication (along with other vendors OSes, so they don't
feel left out...). A polling type network such as USENET or CSNET will not
support the FTP protocol, which requires a port (socket) type connection
mechanism to connect/communicate in real-time.
References to "anonymous" FTP means that a particular host which supports the
FTP protocol has a designated signon they have made public (the FTP protocol
requires a remote user to identify themselves just as though they were
logging in to the host) for the general network user community to access
files they wish to make available. I don't know if more should be said
here about the accepted conventions for signons -- if you have FTP running
and can access ARPA or some other network that has a gateway to the network
the remote host is on, you should contact someone at that host to get more
information on how to proceed.
Paul Richards University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dept of Comp Sci
UUCP: {pur-ee,convex,inhp4}!uiucdcs!richards
ARPA: richards@uiuc.arpa
CSNET: richards%uiuc@csnet-relay