[HECnet] VMS FTP server?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-01-08 04:37, Sampsa Laine wrote:

On 8 Jan 2015, at 05:29, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

On 2015-01-08 03:23, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:


...
The MultiNet FTP Server moves files between similarly capable FTP Clients and keeps the File Attributes consistent while copying data (i.e. You can simply ftp RMS Indexed files between VMS systems and the results will be immediately usable).

I know I read some manual about the DEC TCPIP package ftp server and client also managing this. It would, in fact, be nice to be compatible with that. However, atleast when storing or retreiving files from Unix systems, what DEC did is that they actually transfer two files. One with the data, and a separate one with the file metadata. Ugly, I think, and I would like to try and avoid that.
But that is a client only thing, as far as I can see. Anyone know how VMS does it if talking to another VMS system?
I suspect I might have a hard time if they do it by detecting that the remote server is a VMS system, since I will not lie about that. :-)

Ideally there would be an RFC describing this.   Is there?   Or another spec that spells out the protocol encoding for this magic?

I haven't found any. :-(
On the other hand, I could have missed something.
The "old" way of possibly dealing with this would be to use the page structure mode in ftp, but that would appear to be seriously discouraged. And besides, it is still kindof a difficult fit here.


RFC 959 talks about a file structure command:

FILE STRUCTURE (STRU)

                        The argument is a single Telnet character code specifying
                        file structure described in the Section on Data
                        Representation and Storage.

                        The following codes are assigned for structure:

                              F - File (no record structure)
                              R - Record structure
                              P - Page structure

                        The default structure is File.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc959.txt

Not sure if this is of any help or works with any modern clients..

Note where I said "page structure" above. :-)
I've read RFC 959 (as well as the various additions) backwards and forwards way too many times by now.
The page structure would be a way of doing this. It will definitely not work with any other client out there. But on the other hand, I'm mostly interested in the efficient transport of files between two RSX systems for this part anyway, so it will be towards my own client only.

But I doubt VMS does it this way, and I was curious about if I could possibly do something that would be compatible with VMS, since enough commonality in file storage exists between RSX and VMS for this to actually be useful.

So the question is - what do VMS do when talking to another VMS system, and how does VMS decide when to use the extra abilities?

A different question is how to deal with binary file transfers to (for example) Unix systems. I have some different options there as well, but I haven't figured one out yet that does the right thing under all circumstances.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol