Transferring Files Over the Network

[eva]

Solution


Ok, so most what was discussed in this thread is valid. The problem is that some FTP servers use Amiga paths which are incompatible with FTP clients. If you want to see what that is about, read the rest of the thread and you will see the problem.

I ditched all the FTP daemons and tried proftpd (http://aminet.net/package/dev/gg/proftpd-1.2.2) instead. The thing that sounded promising for me was that proftpd mentions that it keeps paths internally and it does not use the system "shell" (I assume the CLI on AmigaOS) to resolve paths.

So I got the proftpd patches, unarchived and then did the following:

1. Copy proftpd to AmiTCP:serv/
2. Copy sample-configurations/basic.conf to AmiTCP:db/proftpd.conf
3. Edit AmiTCP:db/inetd.conf to first uncomment the existing ftp line and then add the following:
   

   ftp stream tcp nowait root AmiTCP:serv/proftpd -n -c AmiTCP:db/proftpd.conf

4. Edit AmiTCP:db/proftpd.conf and specify the user (I used amiga, provided by default by AmiTCP) as well as inetd server-type:
   

   ServerType inetd
   
   User amiga
   Group users

5. Edit AmiTCP:db/passwd and include a password for a user you want to log-in:
   

   ftproot|Lard004ekVKWQ|101|100|Amiga FTP User|/|cli

   It is important to generate a DSA password to put in the second field.
6. Restart AmiTCP stack.

You can now browse your Amiga using any FTP client, because proftpd treats the paths as:

/Workbench/C

instead of what the other daemons do:

/Workbench:C/

which will not be recognised by the Amiga.

You can check the screenshots in this post to see me browsing the Amiga using Transmit on OSX. :-)

Original Message

I have some trouble with transferring files to and from the Amiga.

So far, I have tried AmTCP's bundled FTP - this one crashes the amiga a lot. Now, I am on wu-ftpd but I am experiencing a lot of trouble with connecting clients that precede the path with a slash "/". For example, FTP clients try to access:

"/Work:/"

and the Amiga FTP servers I have tried respond with "no such directory". However, this works fine using the BSD command-line ftp from OSX. So far, I have tried the following OSX software that does not seem to work with those two Amiga FTP servers:

• Transmit (lists top-level directories)
• Cyberduck (does not list anything)
• Built-in Finder plugin. (does not list anything)
• Flow (does not list anything)
• FireZilla (does not list anything)
• Yummy FTP (lists fine, by setting charset to ASCII but I get Guru 1E0FC788 on larger directories).
• Mac Fusion (does not even connect)

In many cases, both with AmiTCP's FTP daemon and wu-ftpd I get Guru: 1E0FC788 a lot.

So, next that I have tried is Samba. I can mount Amiga Samba shares from Linux and they work fine - however, they do not work at all from more recent Windows machines. Windows cannot connect and only OSX 10.6 manages to mount the shares.

I guess I would like to find out if anybody has found any reliable way to transfer files to and from the Amiga over the network? I have not fished-up the RFC yet, but why do the FTP servers not recognise the trailing slash as in "/Work:/"? Is there any other way to transfer files over the network? What does that Guru meditation faul-error mean? Is there anything like OpenSSH available for the Amiga - and is it stable?

For the time being I am using BSD's command-line ftp client since it does not assume a full path such as "/Work:/Archive/" and accepts "cd Workbench:" or "cd Work:".

[Nobby_UK]

I use BabyFTP (because it allows Anon login) on the PC
and AmiFTP (or mFTP[030]).

and occasionally even Amiga-Explorer
and even Ibrowse FTP://192.168.0.9:21

and EasyNet/AmiTCP's Samba Share
don't ask me how that works... for ages it would not
and then it did.

[crazyc]

I use AmiTradeCenter to go from my Amiga to my NAS.

[Hewitson]

I'd be running the FTP server on the PC and using a client on the Amiga. I've never had any issues doing it like that.

[thomas]

There is a nice little FTP server for such purposes: http://www.pablosoftwaresolutions.co...rver_lite.html

[eva]

Thanks for the suggestions! I was actually looking for an FTP server / fileserver on the Amiga.

wu-ftpd, for example, works well - just that connecting clients issue paths like:

• /Work:/Games/
• /Work:/
• /Work:

which are not recognised by the Amiga shell. These are Unix paths which make lots of sense on Unix but the Amiga cannot resolve them. If one uses the "ftp" BSD command then you can avoid this problem because all input is manual any way and you can avoid this kind of paths ie: input "cd Work:Games/" instead of "cd /Work:/Games/" which is what FTP clients seem to do.

My attempts (guesses) so far have been to change the Amiga shell to an Unix compatible one that, perhaps, may recognise a path like /Work:/ and resolve it to Work: I am hoping this is possible as a workaround because one could recompile wu-ftpd to filter out these extra slashes. I just lack a cross-compiler / toolkit to start dabbling with wu-ftpd sources. That way you could perhaps create some FTP aliases, like map "/Work:/" to "Work:" or "/Games:/" to "Games:" such that the FTP daemon would resolve the paths before attempting a "cwd" command.

[ptyerman]

As has been mentioned already, run the ftp server on a PC. Forget about running one on the Amiga, if you must run something on the Amiga, use Amiga Explorer.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by eva

wu-ftpd, for example, works well - just that connecting clients issue paths like:

• /Work:/Games/
• /Work:/
• /Work:

Such paths would be a security breach anyway. An FTP server (or any other server) must never allow a client to specify a drive name. Only paths inside the configured home directory may be accessed by clients.

It's probably your own fault trying to "cd work:" or something inside the client program. Such paths are not allowed.

[eva]

Originally Posted by thomas

Such paths would be a security breach anyway. An FTP server (or any other server) must never allow a client to specify a drive name. Only paths inside the configured home directory may be accessed by clients.

No. Where do you get this from? An FTP server is oblivious of "drives". An FTP server works on top of the filesystem. It allows you to bind the FTP root to a directory - and that directory can be anywhere on the filesystem path. If security is your concern, then an FTP server should, at best, ensure that you are not able to traverse the path above the FTP root - yet it does not stop you from specifying "/" as an FTP root; regardless whether you think it's a security issue or not.

(Samba also runs on top of the underlying file-system by the way.)

Originally Posted by thomas

It's probably your own fault trying to "cd work:" or something inside the client program. Such paths are not allowed.

No. "cd work:" works fine. I reiterate:

The problem is that the Amiga does not recognise a path such as:

Work:/Games

which have to be written as:

Work:Games

If you bind the FTP root (Amiga's user home directory) to path, say:

Work:ftproot

as in edit "passwd" to say:

ftp|PASSWORD|100|100|Amiga FTP|Work:ftproot|cli

then FTP clients work fine (again, provided that the restrictions of the underlying filesystem are respected since FTP is impartial to them). If you do that, then FTP clients will send paths such as:

Work:ftproot/Text/

which are valid on the Amiga.

However, if you change the FTP user's home directory to a drive:

ftp|PASSWORD|100|100|Amiga FTP|Work:|cli

MOST FTP clients will send paths such as:

Work:/Games

which are paths that are not valid on the Amiga.

Other FTP clients that do not send path such as "Work:/Games", such as the BSD ftp client program will not have trouble issuing "cd Work:", "cd Games:" or "cd Work:Text/" because they are valid Amiga paths.

[ptyerman]

To be honest it sounds like what you need is Amiga Explorer as mentioned before. It does everything that your after doing, without all the drama!

[eva]

Originally Posted by ptyerman

To be honest it sounds like what you need is Amiga Explorer as mentioned before. It does everything that your after doing, without all the drama!

Hahaha! Constant and persistent! That's the way!

You are right, Amiga Explorer sounds good. Trouble is I do not really use Windows (I used it for staging to install the harddrive with WinUAE). wu-ftpd works fine, just that I would have preferred a (more convenient) graphical interface instead of "ncftp" or "ftp" from the command-line. I probably can get Amiga Explorer to work on OSX through wine though...

[ptyerman]

I've seen a thread recently on one of the forums, can't remember which at the moment, but it was about using Amiga Explorer protocols in Linux and OSX. Someone was using it natively and reporting how he did it. Do a search on here, Amibay and amiga.org, it will be on one of them.

[eva]

Here is some output from "ftp" on the command line.

All these work fine:

ftp> cd Games:
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> cd Workbench:
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> cd Work:
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> cd Games:TitusTheFox/
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> cd Work:
250 CWD command successful.

And these do not work (FTP clients send these sometimes - not sure they should, haven't checked the RFC):

ftp> cd /Work:
550 /Work:: No such file or directory.
ftp> cd Work:/
550 Work:/: No such file or directory.
ftp> cd Work:/Text
550 Work:/Text: No such file or directory
ftp> cd /Work:/Text
550 /Work:/Text: No such file or directory

[Amiga_CDTV]

Originally Posted by eva

I probably can get Amiga Explorer to work on OSX through wine though...

I have tried this, but haven't find a way to make it work.

I can get the AE to install, and even show in the Wine file explorer (it's not an application, but it integrates into the explorer) and even sometimes show files over serial, but haven't got it to actually transfer anything.

I'd love to be proven wrong, though!

[ptyerman]

Jesus! Can't folk manage a simple search these days?
Here, try this: http://www.faime.demon.co.uk/retro/lxamiga.html

Found the link I previously referred too, it is here: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...hlight=lxamiga

[Daedalus]

Personally I always use RC-FTPd on the Amiga side when using FTP locally. I've never had any trouble with it, it isn't a resource hog and lets you define mappings for your drives to the ftp root. So, I have Work: mapped to /work/ and so on. Nicely thought out and to be honest, simpler than using a Windows FTP server - especially since I transfer to my Amigas from many different operating systems, many of which have FTP clients built into the desktop environment.

[eva]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Personally I always use RC-FTPd on the Amiga side when using FTP locally. I've never had any trouble with it, it isn't a resource hog and lets you define mappings for your drives to the ftp root. So, I have Work: mapped to /work/ and so on. Nicely thought out and to be honest, simpler than using a Windows FTP server - especially since I transfer to my Amigas from many different operating systems, many of which have FTP clients built into the desktop environment.

Oh, that's great news! So RC-FTPd can map Work: -> /work/? In that case, the issue is solved... Wu-FTPd cannot do that (at least from what I can tell) and the paths are the problem. Thanks!

[eva]

Originally Posted by eva

Oh, that's great news! So RC-FTPd can map Work: -> /work/? In that case, the issue is solved... Wu-FTPd cannot do that (at least from what I can tell) and the paths are the problem. Thanks!

I was wrong: http://xpt.sourceforge.net/techdocs/...ion/index.html

Apparently, the aliases are placed in ftpaccess. So the path problem would be solved by:

# Shortcuts for anonymous FTP incoming (note: the ':' isn't obligatory)
alias work:           /work
alias workbench:  /workbench
alias games:        /games

which should fix the path problem.

[strim]

Originally Posted by eva

I have some trouble with transferring files to and from the Amiga.

If you have any Linux/Unix box around, you should consider using the NFS client integrated in AmiTCP. Once configured, it works almost seamlessly. Files on NFS volume are treated by AmigaOS the same as files that are present locally (so it's very comfortable to use).

I once wrote a tutorial about configuring this, but unfortunately it is only available in Polish. And Google Translate does mediocre job ...

[eva]

Originally Posted by strim

If you have any Linux/Unix box around, you should consider using the NFS client integrated in AmiTCP. Once configured, it works almost seamlessly. Files on NFS volume are treated by AmigaOS the same as files that are present locally (so it's very comfortable to use).

I once wrote a tutorial about configuring this, but unfortunately it is only available in Polish. And Google Translate does mediocre job ...

It's cool - I have used NFS before and AppleTalk but I have dropped them in favour of Samba which seems to be most compatible between Windows, OSX and Unix. Even FTP is less compatible given that OSX cannot write to FTP directories without third-party software.

What I am after though is a reliable way to manipulate Amiga's files remotely. So, a way to mount the Amiga filesystem over the network (regardless whether it's Samba, NFS, etc...) so I can change the files. Ideally, I was after changing some files, modifying them, etc, without having to be at the Amiga. A very simple scenario is all those setting files in S: - would be nice to be able to open them remotely. Another scenario would be to create a source file on the Amiga, edit it remotely and then use telnet to compile the source remotely as well.

Otherwise, yes, client-side I guess even FTP would be fine.