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Institut für Astronomie und Astrophysik

Abteilung Astronomie

Sand 1, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany 		[Uni logo]

Hinweis: Einige Seiten auf astro.uni-tuebingen.de können veraltet sein und werden nicht mehr aktualisiert.
Note: Some webpages at astro.uni-tuebingen.de may be outdated and will no longer be updated.

FTPing at IAAT

Incoming anonymous FTP

Since the introduction of a firewall at IAAT, incoming FTP connections to IAAT machines are only allowed to astro.uni-tuebingen.de. Unfortunately, the introduction of the firewall has made the process of FTPing to astro.uni-tuebingen.de slightly more complicated. The cause for this is that the firewall does not allow standard old FTP clients to connect through it. Symptoms of this are that the login-process works o.k., but that a time-out is received at the first dir or get command. The technical explanation for this behaviour can be found elsewhere.

If you need to connect to astro.uni-tuebingen.de from the outside, you will need to use an FTP client which allows the use of the so-called ``passive mode'' (or PASV-mode). Clients allowing the use of this mode are most web-browsers (e.g., netscape), web offline readers (e.g., wget), and modern FTP programs (e.g., ncftp, mirror or FTP Explorer for Windows NT machines). Follow the links to these programs for explanations on how to setup the FTP clients.

Finally for the small print: Anonymous FTP is a privilege and not a right. Misuse of the account has occured in the past. We are therefore forced to log all transfers from the anonymous account. German law requires us to inform you of this logging. If you feel that your privacy rights are violated by this, do not use the account.

Outgoing FTP Connections

Outgoing FTP connections suffer from the same problems as incoming FTP connections. Again, only ``passive mode'' FTP is allowed. For FTPing from the IAAT machines you will need to use a program that understands the passive mode, e.g. netscape or ncftp. Before using ncftp you will have to correctly setup ncftp.

When accessing a non-anonymous ftp-account with netscape or the internet explorer, you need to use the syntax ftp://name:password@ftp.machine.com in order to enable the authentification at the remote server.

Providing Files on the Anonymous FTP Account

If you have an account on the IAAT machines you can provide files to others via the anonymous FTP account and you can tell others to put files for you onto the anonymous FTP account. The following is a description of the FTP subdirectories and how to use them. Please email the Administrators if you have problems following these instructions.

Incoming data

We do not allow external users to put files onto the FTP account anymore because the account was used mainly by externals trying to exchange software and music, and not for research purposes. If you need to access data from somebody external to IAAT, please ask that person to provide these data from their FTP account or via the World Wide Web.

Outgoing data

To provide data for others to download from the IAAT server you will need to copy these data into a subdirectory of the ~ftp/pub hierarchy. All data in ~ftp/pub and below are accessible to outsiders. Outsiders are prohibited from writing in these directories. Please generate a subdirectory with your login name in the ~ftp/pub hierarchy so that your data can be easily identified by others.

If you want to provide a message that is to be displayed when the subdirectory is first accessed, put the message in the file .message (yes, including the leading dot) in the subdirectory.

Example: To provide data, do the following: 

      aittyc~> mkdir ~ftp/pub/wilms
      aittyc~> cp test123 ~ftp/pub/wilms
      aittyc~> chmod go=r ~ftp/pub/wilms/test123
      aittyc~> echo Testdatei fuer x aus y > ~ftp/pub/wilms/.message
To reiterate, access to the ~ftp hierarcy is available from all Unix machines. Since the files still belong to you, your quota will apply. Furthermore, old files on the anonymous FTP will be removed from time to time, so please clean up after yourself.

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Jörn Wilms | Impressum
Last modified 2002 Mar 28