NeoLogic FTP Server for OS/2 | - by Lief Clennon |
ossibly the easiest part of NeoLogic Network Suite to overlook is the FTP daemon. However, like the rest of the Network Suite, it is rich in features, and surprisingly easy to configure and use. For those of you who were wondering what the "NeoLogic FTPD" icon in the Network Suite folder is, "FTPD" (File Transfer Protocol Daemon) is the typical name for FTP server software. This is NeoLogic's offering for those of you who have been looking for the ability to set up an FTP site on your local machine.
The second and third pages of the Add User notebook deal with read and write permissions. You can enable or disable full access to any drive or you can be more selective, entering a directory name and selecting the Read and Write buttons to give access of either or both forms. Unfortunately, this does not recurse to subdirectories; every directory must be individually specified. Also, if you specify Write but not Read access, files may be sent to the directory, but the user can not enter the directory, or list its contents.
As one would expect, there is also an Edit User (GIF, 7k) notebook, which is identical to Add User, except that the User Name field is a drop-down list of all currently configured users. There is a fairly annoying bug here: the directory access page is occasionally cleared if you switch to it from the Edit User notebook, forcing you to reenter every directory if you want to add one.
There is also a User List dialog, which displays all the current users with accounts. You can hilight the names in the list, but unfortunately you can't go directly to the Edit User notebook with a button or double-click. Finally, there is Remove User, which is the same dialog as the User List, with the addition of a Remove button.
Other options in the configuration notebook (GIF, 9.3k) include setting the maximum number of users to allow (there are separate fields for named and anonymous), and setting a directory message filename, which will be sent to the user the first time he or she switches to a directory containing a file of that name. Also, for security, you can set the read-only attribute on files sent by anonymous users. This will prevent them from being deleted or overwritten by other users.
From the command line, you can tell the server to start minimized, to listen to a port other than 21, or to mimic a Unix FTPd, which removes some features, but ensures compatibility with almost all possible clients. Notably, some web browsers such as Netscape and WebExplorer may need this Unix compatibility feature turned on. (NeoLogic FTPd is RFC 959 and RFC 1123 compliant so any client that is also compliant with RFC standards should work fine.)
I am an avid IRC user, and lately have found myself getting quite a kick out of saying, "No, don't DCC that. Let me set up the FTP daemon. Okay, I'm done, you can send it now!" After all, it's nothing but a double-click, and uses very little in the way of system resources. It's also useful when you've got something you send fairly often. For instance, in my FTP directory is the DOS version of RAR 2.0, my favorite archiver, which you're going to need if you get any other files from me.
All in all, while I don't use the FTP daemon nearly as often as the rest of the NeoLogic Network Suite, it has proven to be quite a time and labor saver, and I applaud the folks at NeoLogic for having the foresight to add something that is normally nonstandard in an end-user software package to their Network Suite.
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