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Text File | 1995-04-20 | 12.5 KB | 274 lines

Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about NcFTP. I get a lot of mail about the program, and since I don't have time to answer personally to most mail, you might get this file in return. (But don't be fooled; I love getting mail! I just don't like replying to all of it...) Here are the questions. Changes since the original have the date after the question. Grep ahead to get to the one you want: 01. I've heard about your ncftp program. Where can I get it? 02. Is NcFTP free? 03. What are .gz and .tgz files? 'compress' barfs when I try it on these. 04. I can't download from your FTP directory, permissions are -rw-------.. 05. I don't have gzip installed on my system. Will you mail it to me? 06. I only have FTP access during business hrs. Will you mail it to me? 07. I don't have an FTP program, will you mail ncftp to me? 08. I have the source code, but how do I compile it? 09. I have ncftp, but I can't get it to compile. 10. I've hacked ncftp a bit. Do you want me to mail you a patch file? 11. When can I expect the new version you keep mentioning? 12. How about adding remote filename completion? 13. How about adding reget? 14. How can I get more sites in my .ncrecent file? (July 3) 15. NcFTP is so good I feel I have to give you something. Where do I send? 16. What can I do to help you out with NcFTP? 17. I'm having problems with ncftp for Linux when using term. 18. Do you mind if I put up ncftp for anonymous FTP? 19. Can I sell the source code or executables of NcFTP for profit? (Aug 6) 20. What does NCEMRSoft stand for? 21. Do you mind if I write an article about ncftp? 22. Does ncftp have a command-line editor and history facility? 23. Can I use colon-mode with put? (July 3) 24. When I try to compile with GNU readline I get link errors. (July 3) 25. I don't want progress reports when ncftp's in the background. (July 3) 26. Does NcFTP have any security holes? (July 17) 27. Has NcFTP been ported to VMS/Windows/OS2/Mac/Amiga? (July 22) 28. How come aborting doesn't work consistently? (August 6) 01. I've heard about your ncftp program. Where can I get it? Come on over to cse.unl.edu, and look in the /pub/mgleason/ncftp directory. You can FTP the latest distribution from there. 02. Is NcFTP free? Yes! Feel free to use the program at school, work, whatever. My goal is to have ncftp come standard with OS releases. All you need to do is install it or bug your sysadmin to install it for you. 03. What are .gz and .tgz files? 'compress' barfs when I try it on these. Most stuff in my FTP area are compressed using the gzip program from GNU. Because we are low on disk space on this machine, I feel I should make every effort to use as little as possible. So you need the gunzip program compiled to unmangle stuff in my FTP area. The most current version will be at the GNU archives at prep.ai.mit.edu:/pub/gnu, but I keep a copy of it in /pub/mgleason. Once you have gunzip installed on your system, you can use it along with tar to get the ncftp sources in C-compiler readable form. I like to do .tgz's and .tar.gz's (which are the same) in one line: gunzip -c ncftp.tgz | tar xvof - (You may have to omit the 'o' from 'xvof') For plain .gz files, all you need to do is: gunzip the.gz 04. I can't download from your FTP directory, permissions are -rw-------.. A lot of people use this machine for work, so I want to discourage FTP connections during the work day. I have a cron task turn permissions off at 9 AM and on again at 5 PM. Sometimes cron doesn't do it's job, so permissions stay turned off. If this happens send me mail (to mgleason@cse.unl.edu). Usually when this happens my mailbox is flooded with these types of messages, but that's fine. I will turn on the permissions manually as soon as I find out. You won't get a reply, so just try back later. 05. I don't have gzip installed on my system. Will you mail it to me? 06. I only have FTP access during business hrs. Will you mail it to me? 07. I don't have an FTP program, will you mail ncftp to me? I don't really like to mail out the program, but I will do it on a limited basis. For (05) I will mail you a copy, but you have to promise you'll make every effort to get gzip installed on your system (it IS worth it!). For (06) I will do it once, but next time you have to setup an 'at' job. Here's a cool Korn shell script that will get the latest version: #!/bin/ksh # getncftp -- Korn shell script to fetch the latest version of ncftp # at a random time between 1 and 5 am. Doesn't take into account # your timezone, so if 1 to 5 am isn't within 9am-5pm USA Central time... (( hr = ($RANDOM % 4) + 1 )) (( min = $RANDOM % 60 )) echo "Fetching at: $hr:$min..." at $hr:$min am <<! cd $PWD ncftp -V -1 cse.unl.edu:/pub/mgleason/ncftp/ncftp.tgz ! For (07) I will mail you a copy, but I haven't heard of any OS's that don't have 'ftp' at least. 08. I have the source code, but how do I compile it? Just type 'make'. That program reads the Makefile, and tries to compile it. 09. I have ncftp, but I can't get it to compile. Please re-read the README for special instructions on what to do with what systems. If you're a novice and don't know how to fix things still, consult a local guru or demand that your sysadmin install it for you. I don't have time to show you how to work with Makefiles and C compilers. But if you do know what you're doing, and it won't compile, let me know. 10. I've hacked ncftp a bit. Do you want me to mail you a patch file? Sure. I can't guarantee that I'll apply it right away or at all, but it can't hurt. Patches that improve portability or fix bugs will most likely be applied right away. Feature enhancements may not, because I'm working on a new version. 11. When can I expect the new version you keep mentioning? 12. How about adding remote filename completion? 13. How about adding reget? Please see the NcFTP-News file(s), in the FTP area. They detail my plans for the next version, 2.0. 14. How can I get more sites in my .ncrecent file? There is no program variable for this, so you have to recompile version 1.7.x and below with -DdMAXRECENTS=37, if you wanted the limit to be 37. However, as of 1.8.0, I added a quick hack that makes the limit 50 instead of 16. The original reasoning for 16 was that if you had sites in your .ncftprc, the open menu would scroll off screen. To get around that problem, the open menu is now fed to your pager. 15. NcFTP is so good I feel I have to give you something. Where do I send? The program's free, but if you insist, you can send something to me at 5705 North 117th Plaza, Omaha, NE 68164-1432. 16. What can I do to help you out with NcFTP? I don't really need any help coding the program. But one thing I could use is access to different types of hardware. At the moment, I only have internet access to an IRIX machine (cse) and a Solaris box. If you have a machine not doing much and it has a decent C compiler and debugger (i.e. dbx) I would be grateful for an account an few megs of diskspace. Sometime down the line, I would like to run the new version through Purify too. I would also like an account to be my permanent home, for maintaining the program, reading/sending mail and USENET news, and offering ncftp for anonymous FTP. That is, unless, the university will let me have a permanent account here. 17. I'm having problems with ncftp for Linux when using term. Unfortunately, I can't be of much help. I just incorporate the term code Linux users send me, and I trust they did it correctly. I would like to get a Linux box of my own sometime. 18. Do you mind if I put up ncftp for anonymous FTP? Since cse.unl.edu is the official site, we get plenty of FTP connections. If you want to shadow my FTP area, that'd be great. 19. Can I sell the source code or executables of NcFTP for profit? (Aug 6) In general, no. Please contact me if you would like to do this, and maybe something can be worked out. 20. What does NCEMRSoft stand for? I won't say what NCEMRS stands for ;-) Sorry! Let's just say the founding members of NCEMRSoft were disappointed in being rejected for the National Honor Society when they were juniors in high school. 21. Do you mind if I write an article about ncftp? I love to see my name in print. It was nice to be able to bring a book with a whole section on ncftp to a job interview. It's also fun seeing your name in "E-Mail Addresses of the Rich & Famous." So if you want to write about ncftp in your book or magazine, feel free! Let me know so I can go have a look at it. 22. Does ncftp have a command-line editor and history facility? You can compile the program along with Chris Thewalt's "Getline" library, available at the FTP area, or with GNU's Readline library. 23. Can I use colon-mode with put? No, and to be honest, it's not a high priority item on the To-Do list. I will do it someday, but not in the immediate future. 24. When I try to compile with GNU readline I get link errors. (July 3) Some systems don't have the 'xmalloc' function in the standard library, and GNU readline apparently uses it. If you get complaints about xmalloc not found, you need to link the library it is in. For my system, I could just add -lxmalloc. If you can't find it: (1) Complain to GNU, that's their problem ;-) (2) Try the Getline library instead. (3) Don't use Getline or Readline at all. 25. I don't want progress reports when ncftp's in the background. (July 3) If you want to do a transfer in the background, you need to tell the program to not use progress meters. You can do that by setting progress-meter to 0, setting verbose to quiet, or from the command line, use -V -1. 26. Does NcFTP have any security holes? (July 17) To the best of my knowledge, there are no security holes. There are a couple things to be aware of though. A user can elect to put passwords in the .ncftprc (.netrc) file. The program changes the mode of the rc to -rw-------, but that's a minor problem that has existed with the regular ftp for years. Some sites don't like to have any information about their internal network known to the outside. Such sites often run a "firewall" that restrict network activity. Often such a setup requires the use of "Passive FTP" mode. The default method of FTP is what I call "Sendport FTP." This method tells the remote server which port on the local host to send data to. Passive FTP gets around this by having the server initiate the data connection. Again, Sendport FTP has been the way the regular 'ftp' has been doing it for a long time, partly because the FTP protocol's minimum implementation specifies Sendport as a requirement, and not Passive FTP. Older versions of ncftp did not support Passive FTP, but it has recently been added. On the other hand, ncftp provides built-in support for system logging, for the paranoid sysadmin that has to know everything a user does with ncftp. 27. Has NcFTP been ported to VMS/Windows/OS2/Mac/Amiga? (July 22) It has not been ported to VAX/VMS, or MS Windoze, and I have no immediate plans to do it myself. There is a program called MaxiFTP for OS/2 whose feature set (and documentation) is based on NcFTP. An earlier version of NcFTP was ported to AmigaDOS awhile back, but I think they had some problems with later versions. For Macintosh, I happily recommend "Fetch." 28. How come aborting doesn't work consistently? (August 6) In the past there have been problems with aborting file transfers (which includes quitting while paging a remote file). Interrupting sometimes caused the program to hang, act weird, or not work at all. A work-around was introduced, so that when you hit ^C the program doesn't abort the transfer, but it does supress further output to the screen. This hack was put into place a long time ago, but I haven't attempted to squash it because it's low on my priority list. I'm not satisfied with that behavior, but it will have to do until I get the new version out the door. If you like, you can use the buggy interrupt code anyway if you compile with TRY_ABOR.