INTERNET MADE EASY
BY Mike Robinson
Article in BBS Caller Digest
September 1993
NEWCOMERS TO THE INTERNET
If you have ever used a BBS, most of you have found that one of the
most active areas on a BBS is the file transfer section. The most popular
systems allocate hundreds of megabytes of disk storage to maintaining
archives of files. To make individual files easier to find they are
usually sorted by type. There are file areas for games, utilities,graphics
and sound, to name just a few.All this is available throught the Internet.
The main method of file transfer over the Internet is called FTP, or
File Transfer Protocol. Since most Internet connections are linked at
several kilobytes/second, transfer is fast. You can download 1 Megabyte
computer file from a BBS at 9600 baud. This might take you approximately
20 minutes. That same file, however can be transmitted using FTP at speeds
of 10Kbytes/second. That can cut your transfer time to just a few minutes.
Definetly convenient!
ANONYMOUS FTP
When you download a file from your local BBS, you first need to have
some sort of access to the system. The same is true when using FTP. FTP,
as the name implies, trasfers files from one Internet site (the remote
site) to a second (the local site) . Obviously, you will need to have
access to the local site. But what you might not realize is that you must
also have access to the second site. For instance, some national companies
are connected to the Internet. If you are in California, and the file you
need is on a computer in New York, if you have access to the account in
New York, FTP will allow you to easily retrieve those files.
That might sound okay for a business, but what about us, the average
PC user? We would like to get files too, but we dont have access to other
systems. This is where anonymous FTP comes into play. Anonymous FTP is
almost like having a guest account on a computer. Anyone can call up to
retrieve files. And , just like your local BBS, Anonymous FTP sites may
specialize in certain types of files.
Before I begin, there is one note of caution. The main purpose of
Internet is to do work. The FTP site you call must pay for all the
maintenance and upkeep of its sytems. Since file transfer slows down
overall systems performance, try to call out of peak times. For example,
file transfer at mifnight will have much less effect than a file transfer
at noon. Usually FTPing outside of business hours is a good rule of thumb
to follow.
SAMPLE SESSION
There are many different programs used to do file transfer. However,the
industry standard is a program called ironicallt enought, FTP. In our
sample session, we will contact a university in St. Louis. There are many
sites available. See Table 1 for a few sites and their respective areas
of interest.
To begin, start the FTP program. (Typed commands appear below)
ftp
Next, open a connection.
open wuarchive.wustl.edu
In our example,wuarchive.wustl.edu is the remote site we wish to connect
to. Shortly, you should receive a message that says
Connected to wuarchieve
.wustl.edu
The next prompt will ask for your name. Respond by typing anonymous.
Name (coral.bucknell.edu:mrobinsn) : anonymous
The name in the parenthesis indicates my local site and my name. Next,
the system will inform you that you need to send a password. You should
send your id name and site.
331 Guest login ok, send ident as password
Password :
[email protected]
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply
ftp>
Now, you're logged onto the system, and you can transfer files as you
wish. Some access restrictions apply For instance, some sites do not allow
you to send a file to them. Others won't allow you to create new direct-
ories, but will allow you to send files to existing directories.
There are many commands available in the FTP program. Type a question
mark to get a listing of the commands. Many commands are similar to DOS
commands, such as dir, del,rmdir,etc. here's what you'll get if you do
dir.
ftp> dir
200 PORT command successful
150 Opening ASCII node data connection for /bin/ls
total 1045
-rwxr-xr-x 2 7 21
512 Nov 3 1992 . login
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 150
512 Jun 8 1993 public
(etc)
226 Transfer complete.
2387 bytes received in 0.9 seconds
ftp>
The above directory listing is a standard UNIX directory. The filenames
with a 'd' in the access column, such as public, are directories. You can
change to a directory using the cd command similar to DOS.
TRANSFERRING FILES:
You will need to search through the various directories to find the file
uou want. One disadvantage of FTP is that there is no file description
service, such as is available on a BBS. Only perseverance can win this
game! Once you find the file, however, you can download it to your system
by using the get command.
get filename
If you are transferring files other than purely ASCII files, use the
binary command. This will ensure that file transfer is done exactly,
instead of using character translation that some systems use on ASCII
file transfers. Table 2 is a list of the most common FTP commands and
their respective functions.
There's a lot out there for the taking. As you experiment with FTP and
the Internet, you'll find faster ways of navigating the massive amounts
of information out there.
Table 1. Popular Anonymous FTP sites
sumex.stanford Macintosh archives
wuarchive.wustl.edu Incredible large MS-DOS archives
saffron.inset.com Sound programs, newsletters, more
ftp.ulowell.edu Games
Table 2. Common FTP commands
get Transfers one file FROM the remote site
put Transfers one file TO the remote site
cd Change directory
bye Log off the remote site and exit FTP program
binary Use binary transfer mode
dir Directory
mget Uses wildcards to get more than one file
prompt Used with mget, will turn off/on prompting for each file.
