SFTP ASCII file transfers to OPENVMS

[rkelly]

Hello,

I am running OpenVMS 7.3-2 and have been encountering intermittent problems when transferring ASCII files from a remote server to my VMS server.  Sometimes the file is not readable by our application.

This appears to be a result of the files coming over in binary mode, but I don't see an option for switching to ASCII mode as I would have done in FTP.  I saw some other reports of this issue in Google, but no clear resolutions.

Is there a workaround for this, or is there some way to convert the file after the fact?  has this been fixed in later releases of VMS?

Thank you

Richard

[rkelly]

Thanks,

I didn't put a lot of detail because this seemed to be a know issue on other forums and I thought that raising the problem of handling ASCII file transfer would be enough to give me a few pointers from an HP forum.  I was told about a year ago that there were some gaps in the way SFTP handled ASCII files (compared to FTP),  I just could not recall exactly what they were and wondered if there was any progress on this.   I don't have examples because I did not encounter the issue first hand, I'm waiting for some sample files to replicate the problem.

Given the poor ESP capabilities on this forum I will also raise this on the psychic friends network and let you know the outcome :).

[Hoff]

HP was aware of a corruption in sftp involving transfers between VMS and non-VMS systems based on one recent discussion, and HP was reportedly working on a fix. If your (corruption?) problem is related to that, call up the support center and ask for the status of that work, and whether a patch is available.

If you don't have support, then zip the files and transfer that.

[rkelly]

Thanks very much.  I will follow up on this suggestion.  I corresponded with support and they indicated that some SFTP clients will not transfer to OpenVMS in ASCII mode  (like PSFTP).  I will have to find out exactly what was used, I think bitvise was tried.

[Hoff]

sftp is not ftp.   sftp does not have a user-visible file-format selection.   There is no transfer mode selection for ASCII or BINARY within sftp.  (That's usually considered a Good Thing, too.)

Quoting the sftp specs "Regardless the server operating system, the file will always be opened in "binary" mode (i.e., no translations between different character sets and newline encodings)."

If an sftp client does not transfer a text file correctly, then there is an issue or a bug within the sftp client or the sftp server, or the file itself is using a character encoding (eg: UTF-8) or a file record format that one of the systems involved cannot properly contend with.

I'd expect that common tools such as PuTTY psftp and FileZilla would work (when the files themselves are compatible), though I don't have any Windows boxes available here to confirm that.  There have been issues with sequential file handling within VMS sftp components, and here is a recent c.o.v. discussions of sftp corruptions.

[ranger57]

Hoff,

I can confirm that both PuTTY and Filezilla work fine transferring files using sftp from Windoze.

[Hoff]

> I can confirm that both PuTTY and Filezilla work fine transferring files using sftp from Windoze.

sftp can and should work here, and file corruptions are unintended misbehavior.  

There are cases where corruptions have arisen and these have been reported.

Record formats within sequential files can be a more complex topic than might initially be recognized; RMS has various of these, as do other platforms.

I'm not aware of issues with the PuTTY and FileZilla clients.  The errors I'm aware of have been with particular file combinations and the OpenVMS sftp server within at least some of the available TCP/IP Services versions.

Testing IP networking usually involves fairly extensive product matrices, and with clients on Windows and with non-Windows platforms. 

See the included link for a discussion of the sftp corruptions with recent versions.