Re: FTP & firefox... -- WEB400

All:

Thanks for the help...I took Scott's suggestion and am going to use 
http...I'm going to combine that using the jt400 jar files to get a list 
of IFS files for the user to click on...

Shane



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Re: [WEB400] FTP & firefox...

Does anyone know why I'm getting this message when trying to FTP to the
IFS of my V5R3 iSeries in FireFox?
The FTP server 215 OS/400 is the remote operating system.  The TCP/IP
version is "V5R3M0". is currently unsupported.


You just want me to tell you why that's happening, and not fix it at all? 
Great...  that'll be my easiest job today.

The problem is that the FTP standard, when it was written, did not 
designate a particular format for the "list" subcommand.  (When you type 
DIR into an FTP client, it sends the LIST subcommand to the server.)

Anyway, there was no format designated for LIST. Instead, the FTP server 
could send any format it wanted.  The client was supposed to display 
whatever it was on the user's screen, so as long as the server returned 
something that a user could read, all was well.

Here's the problem:  People started writing GUI FTP clients that not only 
displayed this screen, but also tried to interpret it's contents.  The 
program itself needed to know which part of the screen was the file type 
(so a lovely icon could be displayed) what part was the file's name, what 
part was the size of the file, etc, etc,etc.   Since the format of the 
screen isn't standardized, and the server can send anything it wants, this 

causes all sorts of weird code to be written.

The Firefox FTP software works by asking the server what type of server it 

is.  In your example, the server is returning something like "The TCP/IP 
Version is V5R3M0" or something like that.  Each individual FTP server 
returns a different string to identify itself.

There's code in Firefox that looks at this string, and then inteprets the 
contents of the directory differently, depending on the FTP server you've 
connected to.  Since the format isn't standardized, it has to have 
separate code for each FTP server type.

The people who wrote firefox didn't write code to handle the OS/400 FTP 
server -- so it's unrecognized, and you get the error.

As Simon pointed out, I wrote a patch that fixed this bug in Nvu which is 
code that was originally taken from the same Mozilla project where 
firefox's roots come from.  However, both projects have doubtless changed 
their code a little bit since then, so I don't know if that patch would 
help much, and at any rate, they'd have to incorporate it into firefox for 

you, or you'd have to compile your own copy of firefox to incorporate a 
change like that.  Possible, but somewhat difficult.

Since firefox isn't a very good FTP client, anyway, I have to wonder why 
you'd bother!  If you want firefox to download something from your 
iSeries, use HTTP.  If you want FTP access to your iSeries, use a better 
FTP client!  (FileZilla, for example).