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Help with FTP
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is superior to email for transferring files, especially
large ones. It is faster and more reliable. The Unix Primer has a good introduction to
Using FTP.
You might also try the
FTP manual page.
The FTP server at CSE is ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au. It is the only server
specifically configured for FTP; you may be able to establish FTP connections to
other servers, but you are likely to run into problems sooner or later. To
transfer your files from one computer (eg. at home) to another (eg. your CSE
account) you connect to the FTP server either via the command line with
ftp ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au or by entering ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au
into the settings of a GUI FTP client.
If you want to make files in your homedir available to other people around the
world you need to setup anonymous FTP access as follows:
create a directory ~/public_ftp
put the files in this directory
chmod -R a+rX ~/public_ftp/*
If you also create a subdirectory called ~/public_ftp/incoming then people can
upload files there anonymously. If you choose to do this then remember to
check this directory frequently as you will be held responsible for
any malicious or undesirable files written there! These files will also be
charged to your diskquota. You are strongly advised to use a .ftpaccess file
to restrict access to ~/public_ftp/incoming, see below. The contents of
~/public_ftp/incoming cannot be read or listed.
If you are using commandline FTP, then you'll find a number of familiar unix
commands such as pwd, cd and ls work.
get and put are the commands for downloading and
uploading files respectively; to move more than one file at a time, use
mget and mput. Wildcards such as '*' don't work with
get and put, but do withmget and
mput.
/pub/users/fbloggs corresponds to ~fbloggs/public_ftp. Traversing outside this
directory is blocked; anything you want available via FTP has to be directly
placed under ~/public_ftp.
To login anonymously to our ftpserver, type ftp ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au
and login as 'anonymous', with your email address as the password. You will be put into /home/ftp;
to get to someone's public_ftp, type cd pub/users/<username>
(Note: do not put public_ftp in the path). Of course, you can also login
as your CSE account, in which case you will be put into your homedir.
Our FTP server has support for SSL/TLS so if your FTP client supports secure
transfers (eg. lftp) then you can change to an encrypted connection using the
starttls command.
Our FTP server also supports user configurability via .ftpaccess
files, similar to .htaccess files for web access. In your
.ftpaccess you can limit who can access your files and how much
access they have. See the ProFTPd documentation at
www.proftpd.org/docs/ for more
information.
TROUBLESHOOTING
- You are connected to the wrong server. Only ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au is supported
- You are in ASCII mode. Try changing to BIN(ARY) mode
- You are behind a firewall and our server is being blocked from opening a
connection. Use 'remotehelp' to see if your client supports passive mode (usually
abbreviated PASV); if it does, set your client to passive mode which will leave it
up to your host to open the connection.
Different FTP clients use slightly different abbreviations for the standard
FTP commands; type help or (for a GUI client) look at the online
help pages to see how your client supports them.
Reporting a Problem
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