Resumable FTP

[Lawrence Man]

Dear all,

I would like to know if HP-UX release 11.0 can resume FTP from the point of last failure, when it is acting as the FTP client.

So far, I cannot find relevant information from this site.

If third party product is necessary / available, I would also appreciate, and you may let me know via my e-mail address man_lawrence@yahoo.com

Thanks and regards,

Lawrence Man

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

wu-ftp supports resuming of FTP transfer.

http://www.wu-ftpd.org/wu-ftpd-faq.html#IDX90

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong
Brainbench MVP for Unix Admin
http://www.brainbench.com

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

HP-UX does not support the resume capability if the hp-ux system is the ftp client. Other third party applications do support the resume options but they use windows client. Many such ftp client softwares are available. Just try a google search with ftp and resume as options.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

Try these links,

http://www.cd.chalmers.se/~hch/filerunner.html

http://www.simtel.net/pub/pd/55077.html

http://linux.tucows.com/internet/ftp.html

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Gregory Fruth]

The FTP client "ncftp" may do what you need.

http://www.ncftp.com/

From the man page:

The program tries to ``resume'' downloads by default. This means
that if the remote FTP server lost the connection and was only
able to send 490 kilobytes of a 500 kilobyte file, you could
reconnect to the FTP server and do another get on the same file
name and it would get the last 10 kilobytes, instead of
retrieving the entire file again. There are some occasions where
you may not want that behavior. To turn it off you can use the
``-Z'' flag.

[Lawrence Man]

Dear all,

Thanks all for the response. I find that the HP-UX FTP client supports reget, which can resume transfer from the point of failure.

However, I learn from other sites that resumable FTP also requires server side support.

In my case, the ftp server is running MVS. It can be configured to support checkpoint. I tried to use "reget" myself to get a file from MVS to HP. FTP prompted the error 504 "Restart requires EBCDIC data type". Any idea about this? I could not find an explanation from the HP site for the time being after several searches. The get command could be run successfully.

On the other hand, I tried ncftp but hit the error below.

PASS command failed - __passwd() error : EDC5143I No such process.

Could someone shed some light on this as well?


Lawrence

[Gregory Fruth]

One annoying feature of ncftp is that if you don't
supply a "-u username" argument, it assumes
you wanted to log in as "anonymous". Perhaps
that error message is MVS's way of saying that
it couldn't log you in as "anonymous". If this is the
problem, try "ncftp -u remoteuser remotehost",
where "remoteuser" is your user name on MVS.

HTH

[Mark Fenton]

Lawrence, I think your other error must be MVS's way of telling you that it doesn't know from what point in the file to restart transmission -- I seriously doubt that HP-UX cares much about EBCDIC.

good luck.

[Lawrence Man]

Thanks Gregory for making me getting one step closer to the objective to enable resumable ftp GET from mainframe running MVS to HP-UX, when using ncftp.

However, ncftp's behavior is not the same as the "native" ftp client on HP-UX. The current directory on mainframe is 'PLXNFTP.'. I want to get the file 'PLXN.LXN.CUSTINTF.TROJ'. On the other hand, the same command works in native HP-UX ftp client. How may I specify the correct relative / absolute MVS source file path in ncftp? I have tried several forms of CD (change directory commands) as well but none succeeded. I have forgotten
most of the MVS terminologies and techniques after last use 10 years ago.

For native FTP, I switched the type to EBCDIC. FTP then complained when I used reget, saying that "Restart requires Block or Compressed transfer mode". On the contrary, HP-UX native FTP clients only support stream transfer mode. Therefore, I believe I have hit a dead end to pursue using native HP-UX ftp client.

Thanks!

[Lawrence Man]

Some clarifications:

In the message I posted above, I tried to perform the command:
get 'PLXN.LXN.CUSTINTF.TROJ' test.txt
at the ftp prompt.

For native HP-UX ftp client, it works.

For ncftp, it raised the error:
get PLXN.LXN.CUSTINTF.TROJ: server said: Data set 'PLXNFTP.PLXN.LXN.CUSTINTF.TROJ' not found
get test.txt: server said: Data set 'PLXNFTP.TEST.TXT' not found

[Gregory Fruth]

Your first example:

get 'PLXN.LXN.CUSTINTF.TROJ' test.txt

In the regular ftp client, this retrieves the remote
file "TROJ" and saves it in the local file "text.txt".

However, the "get" command in ncftp behaves
more like the "mget" command in the regular
ftp client. It is trying to get the two files
"PXLN..." and "text.txt". This explains one
of your problems.

As for your "cd" problem, is "." the separator
between directory names? If so, perhaps
ncftp is getting confused by it.
Try using "cd" one level at a time, e.g.:

cd PLXN
cd LXN
cd CUSTINTF
get TROJ

If all else fails, you ought to be able to use the "quote"
command inside of ftp or ncftp to send the CWD
command directly to the server:

quote cwd PLXN.LXN.CUSTINTF
get TROJ

If the EBCDIC issue becomes a problem later,
remember that you can use the "dd" command
(outside of ftp) to convert between EBCDIC and
ASCII.

Good luck!