FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL – FTP

 

 FTP enables us transfering large amount of data through Internet. For FTP data transfer we need two different software:

 

• FTP server
• FTP client

 

Two FTP clients can not transfer data between themself. As almost all computers have FTP client as part of their operating systems a little of them have FTP server. Never the less there are many third party FTP servers on the market for any computer and operating systems.

 

From the computer point of view the electronic data are of only two type ascii or binary. Ascii means human readable text and everything else is binary (Web pages are in ascii format). If we try to transfer binary data with ascii protocol the result is unusable file.

 

USING FTP

 

Figure 1: connection to the ftp server establised

In the Figure 1 we see that FTP requires the name of computer, later username and at last the password. If entered data are correct we are granted the access to the data stored on the remote computer. On the Figure 1 we used authorised connection. Many connections are unauthorised or anonymous connections. The procedure for anonymous connection is the same as authorised connection with the difference that you enter word anonymous for username and your e-mail as password.

 

Figure 2: Transfer (download) the file from the remote computer

 

On the Figure 2 we see the procedure to download the file from the remote server. First we use command to list files on remote server (dir), later we set the transfer mode (bin = binary), followed by command that prints hash mark every 2048 bytes (hash) we use this to see the progress of transmission and at last we use command to download file v1.jpg from the remote server (get v1.jpg).

 

We can connect using the same procedure to the computers ftp.arnes.si, ftp.microsoft.com, ftp.fri.uni-lj.si All this servers allow anonymous connection.

 

Special FTP clients:

 

·        Cute FTP

·        WS-FTP32

·        FTP Explorer

·        Cupertino

·        Internet Neighborhood

 

We can find this software on the public access Internet servers as www.tucows.com (http://tucows.siol.net), www.winfiles.com or www.shareware.com

 

Examples of FTP servers: