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 : mrobinsn@bucknell.edu 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.