RBrowser

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© Copyright Robert Vasvari, 1993-2003.

FTP with SSL/TLS

RBrowser implements the only standard (sort of) that is out there, RFC 2228 to have SSL encrypted secure FTP access. This means that both control and data connections are secure, whether it is in passive mode or not. This protocol is not to be confused with SFTP which is part of the SSH2 protocol. RBrowser's implementation has been tested against all commercial FTP-SSL/TLS servers we could find, including WS-FTPD Pro. There are no options to be set other than the regular FTP options. Things to keep in mind with standard FTP versus SSL: encrypted data transfers are much slower! That is the price we pay for security. FTP with SSL is included in the RBrowser Basic license.

FTP Text Mode, ASCII Upload, Line endings, however you want to call it:

The Macintosh community is used to being different... UNIX uses the linefeed character to end lines in text files (ASCII 10), whereas legacy MacOS uses carriage return (ASCII 13). So, one had a problem: if you are maintaining a website, you edit your pages on a Mac, the line endings in these pages must be translated to UNIX during the upload. Of course, it is a very inexact science figuring out which file is text, which is formatted text (like RTF) or worse, binary. Attempting translations on anything but basic text files corrupts the file! Your trusty old Fetch 3.0.3 did this very well in the old world by relying on types and creators to figure out what files to translate... Guess what! This is the new world now. In this brave new world, Mac text files and UNIX text files coexist, and most text files have no types/creators at all. This makes translation especially on download very difficult, since it is impossible to know if the file was intended to be a Mac or a UNIX text file. Our recommendation: stay away from any of this and use the default, which is binary. Most HTML editors, BBEdit among them, are perfectly capable of translating your old mac text format into the UNIX format and keeping it there! Make sure you set the preferences in BBEdit or your editor to use UNIX line endings. THIS IS THE STANDARD IN OSX!. For those of you who want to still use the translations, here are the rules: On upload it pretty much works as expected; in Automatic mode RBrowser uses type/creator info to figure out if a file is to be translated or not. On download, text mode will mean that the downloaded file will be a Mac text file! If you use unix files, use binary mode only.

RBrowser is not loading the contents of my directories in FTP.. help!:
There could be two main causes of this:
1. Most likely you turned on your firewall, so the FTP data connection is blocked from the server. Use passive FTP, by selecting the switch on the Login Panel.
2. If that does not make difference, maybe the LIST "-a" flag is causing a problem for the server. This is rare, but it happens. Call up this Site on the Login Panel, so the hostname/user info are all filled in. Click "Site Preferences" to bring up the Site specific preferences for THIS site. Under the General tab, turn off the option called "Add -a to LIST command". Apply and close the panel, then login again.

MacBinary Support:

RBrowserLite has fairly good macbin support. It works two ways:
1. If connected to a macbinary-aware FTP server (like NetPrezenz): If the Macbinary option is turned on, RBrowser will send the "MACBIN E" command, then macbinarize on upload WITHOUT changing the filename. On download, and on download ONLY, the name gets appended the .bin extension IF the corresponding option is turned on. Please note the following: RBrowserLite does not unpack the file if you download from one of these servers; you will end up with a macbinary file, with or without the .bin extension, depending on you personal preference settings. We recommend you keep the "Add .bin to filename" option checked to avoid confusing the macbin and regular files.
2. Non-Macbinary-aware FTp server (almost all of them out there):
It is still possible to create macbinary archives for each file uploaded to this server. If the "Add .bin to filename" option is checked, the filename will be appended by .bin on UPLOAD ONLY. The server will treat this as a regular binary file, and not change or interpret it any way. This is a good way to backup macintosh files onto any general FTP servers. On download, these files are not touched in any way, you can unpack them using any unarchiver (like Stuffit).

Keeping too many connections to the server:

By default, FTP sites keep two simultaneous connections to the remote host. The FTP server sometimes cannot handle all these connections opened at the same time so some of them fail during the directory load. At that point, RB thinks the directory that failed to load does not exist, so it clears everything that is under that directory. If you have shelf items that are under this directory, they will be cleared too.

Workaround: in the FTP Site Preferences Panel adjust Max connections and Max persistent connections to 1.

Opening/Copying to Local Host:

If the remote FTP server is a Windows box, be mindful of the following: even if the file is listed in the browser, it might not be accessible to you, because it may have the "hidden" attribute set. If you try to retrieve this file, you will probably get an error like this:

550 filename: The system cannot find the file specified

Server to Server transfers:

The operations affected are: Copy and Move on the same machine, and remote to remote transfer. The operation may fail with an error message similar to this:

Server to Server transfer failed: 500 Illegal PORT command.

A possible explanation: Server to Server transfer requires one server to be in passive mode and another server to connect to it using the PORT command. On some sites this capability is disabled on purpose. On others they might be using a version wu-ftpd that has this feature disabled by default. If this is the case, you are at the mercy of your system administrator.

File Permissions on uploads:

RBrowser has no setting for this, it always (tries to) duplicate the permissions of the source file on the local system. In FTP this sometimes fails as some servers do not allow CHMOD commands.
If you end up with the wrong permissions on the remote host, first check to make sure your permissions are correct on the local box. Then, if permissions get mangled during upload, check with your FTP server's admin about it.

Crippled servers:

RBrowser does its best to connect to servers that are, shall we say, not configured correctly. RBrowser depends on the long listing (LIST), which some FTP servers do not support. If you connect to one of these, the directory listings will look like if they were all files and no directories. As you click on any of the files, RBrowser will attempt to find the attributes of the file (whether it is a directory, size, date, etc.). Afterwards, the Inspector will update with the newly acquired attributes.

'@' appearing at the end of filenames:

Some FTP servers show that the file is a link by appending a '@' character at the end of filenames representing symbolic links. This will confuse RBrowser, which thinks that the @ is a legal character that is part of the filename. This will make browsing impossible, since filename@ really does not exist. For instance, if you go to ftp.cdrom.com in the /pub directory you will see files like linux@ and java@. Clicking on these files will not load the directory. Workaround: use the Find Panel (Command-f) . Type in /pub/linux and the desired path will load.

Some ISPs allow you access only to your own directory by making their FTP server think your home directory is the root. Because of that, the user/group info displayed in the browser is false, usually just numbers like 182673:20005. This keeps RBrowser from recognizing ownership of your files, so upon saving them you might get messages like "File xxx may not be readable," etc. In this case, you can ignore the message and click "Try Anyway."