Improved FTP access for Mosaic

Dave_Raggett (dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
Mon, 29 Nov 93 15:16:19 GMT


Call for volunteers:

The current FTP code for X Mosaic 2.0 requires FTP servers to connect
to the client for data transfers. This fails for users running Mosaic
in a closed subnet when trying to access hosts outside that subnet,
even with my gateway :-(

The solution is to rewrite HTFTP.c to use the PASV command which
causes the server to send the client an address/port so that the
client connects to the server for data transfers.

It seems timely, to also consider displaying the instructions,
disclaimers, diagnostics, etc, that servers send when you first
connect to them. We should also drop the assumption that the
"home" directory is '/' and ensure that we can access non-Unix
systems like VMS or Windows NT(*) in a more robust fashion than now.

I would be happy to patch HTFTP.c but am very pressed for time
right now. Has anyone the time to help us all out?

Dave Raggett

(*) e.g. ftp://rhino.microsoft.com/ which is Windows NT based