Some ncftp Questions?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Tim here.

> many times Tim has been a large help

Aw, shucks. Thanks.

> most of you are not on Shellworld.

not for lack of trying, sending an email to the person in charge that
Karen mentioned.  I'll try the admin@ account and see if I have any
better luck.

> First, it it normal that I cannot up-or-download from my home
> directory, only sub-directories?

Do you mean from your home-directory of your local machine or *to*
your home directory on Shellworld?

Nothing should prevent you from uploading *from* your local home
directory any differently than any other local directory.

As for uploading *to* your home directory on Shellworld, it would be
the administrator's choice.  Flying without an actual account, a
couple ideas occur to me:

- if you can only upload to *one* directory, the administrator may
  have configured the FTP server so that one directory is your FTP
  drop, assuming that once you've dropped your files there, you can
  move your files elsewhere

- if you can upload to *multiple* directories but not your home
  directory, this is somewhat weird.  I'd suspect that your directory
  permissions are different and the FTP server can't write to the
  root directory but can upload to the subdirectories. Check the
  output of

    ls -dlF $HOME | awk '{print $2}'

  which are the permissions on your home directory and compare them
  with some directory *inside* your home directory (in this case
  "some_sub_directory") where you *can* drop files into:

    ls -dlF $HOME/some_sub_directory | awk '{print $2}'

I wouldn't go changing write-permissions to your home directory (you
may not be able to) as others could then also read/write from your
home directory.

As an alternative, I'd recommend using sftp, scp, or possibly rsync
to transfer your files.  They use an encrypted SSH connection rather
than transmitting credentials in plain-text and should be able to
write to your home directory since they drop privileges to become
your user when you log in, not trying to drop files as an FTP user.

As an added bonus, rsync compares what's on both ends with a very
efficient algorithm, sending only data that's missing.

> Next, I usually run a download command such as
> mget -DDR *.*
> from within a directory, The -DD will delete from the far end when
> complete. The -R is recersive, but lately its not working.

This may depend both on the client you're running on your end and on
what the server understands on the remote end.  Rsync does a good job
of being consistent on both ends, allowing you to delete files
(whether delete files on the sending side once they've been
transmitted to the receiving side, or deleting files on the receiving
side that aren't present on the sending side so the directories are
mirrored) and recurse into subdirectories.  If you experiment with
rsync, *always* use the "-n" ("--dry-run") flag first to see what it
*would* do.  Once it's doing what you think it should be doing,
re-run the command without the "-n" flag. Rsync also preserves
permissions by default.

Hopefully this gives you a couple things to try.

-tim