From csulb.edu!library.ucla.edu!agate!spool.mu.edu!mnemosyne.cs.du.edu!nyx10.cs.du.edu!not-for-mai l Fri Oct 7 17:45:29 1994 Path: csulb.edu!library.ucla.edu!agate!spool.mu.edu!mnemosyne.cs.du.edu!nyx10.cs.du.edu!not-for-mai l From: esasaki@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Eric Sasaki) Newsgroups: alt.comp.fsp Subject: REPOST: alt.comp.fsp FAQ (part 1/2) Date: 30 Sep 1994 22:51:39 -0600 Organization: University of Denver, Math/CS Dept. Lines: 410 Message-ID: <36ipsr$1ul@nyx10.cs.du.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: nyx10.cs.du.edu X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #3 (NOV) Since I've been seeing quite a few requests for the FAQ, I'm reposting the last known revision of the FAQ. I got it from Andy Doherty's WWW page. Hopefully, Andy's working on a new version of the FAQ (or on the RFC, or on FSP 3.0, or... ) Saki [cut here] Last-modified: 1994/06/07 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Frequently Asked Questions about FSP ------------------------------------ *** Please read this before posting to alt.comp.fsp. *** --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (NEW) IMPORTANT NOTICE: EVERYONE PLEASE READ THIS! Pete Bevin and Phil Richards are no longer the FSP maintainers, Andy Doherty is now the FSP maintainer. Hopefully this FAQ should now be fairly up to date and accurate, but if anyone spots anything which is out of date or just plain wrong, could they let me know ... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Recent Additions: New Question 2.5. What about FSP v.3.0 ? Site information changes. Changes to Maintainers ... New Question 1.6. Why do FSP clients appear to hang sometimes ? Updates on clients available for OS/2 systems [2.2.3]. Updates to maintainers in [4.1]. Updates to site information [5.1]. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- These are the answers to some of the frequently asked questions about FSP. Posted weekly to alt.comp.fsp, alt.answers and news.answers. This article answers the following questions. 1: Introduction and Help 1.1 What's alt.comp.fsp? What's FSP? 1.2 Where can I get FSP? 1.3 Help! I don't understand how to use FSP! 1.4 What are those funny "R" and "I" characters? 1.5 Why should I, as a site admin, run an FSP daemon? 1.6 Why do FSP clients appear to hang sometimes ? 2: FSP software and resources 2.1 Where can I get an FTP-like interface for FSP? 2.2 Where can I get a graphical interface for FSP? 2.2.1 UNIX (X-Windows) 2.2.2 MS-Windows 2.2.3 OS/2 2.2.4 Macintosh 2.3 Where can I get hold of a list of sites? 2.4 Where can I get pictures of naked women in compromising position and a copy of SuperRoboTermiSonicBuster II ? 2.5 What about FSP v.3.0 ? 3: Technical Issues 3.1 What are the main differences between FSP and FTP? How does FSP work? 3.2 How secure/anonymous is FSP? 3.3 Why not add passwords to FSP? 3.4 So what *does* FSP stand for? 4: Who's who in FSP? 4.1 Who writes and maintains FSP software? 4.2 Who writes and maintains FSP client software? 4.3 Who helped put this FAQ together? 5: Site Information 5.1 What FSPable sites exist ? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 1: Introduction and Help Q.1.1 What's alt.comp.fsp? What's fsp? Alt.comp.fsp is a Usenet newsgroup for discussing the FSP file transmission protocol. It was created on Tuesday 4th May 1993 by Wen-King Su (wen-king@cs.caltech.edu) after there was no objection on alt.config. Before the newsgroup, there was a mailing list (fsp-discussion) for talking about FSP software internals. This newsgroup is for discussion of both writing and using the software. FSP is a protocol, a bit like FTP (but see below), for moving files around. It's designed for anonymous archives, and has protection against server and network overloading. It doesn't use connections, so it can survive things falling over. Quote: `FSP is what anonymous FTP *should* be'. Q.1.2 Where can I get FSP from? The `official' place for FSP distributions is ftp.germany.eu.net (192.76.144.75), in the directory /pub/network/inet/fsp. It is available both by FTP and FSP: the FSP server is on port 2001. The latest versions are: Unix, VMS: fsp.271.tar.Z OS/2: fsp2-03b.zip MS-DOS: pcfsp105.zip The Unix version is the `original', and was originally written by Wen-King Su: Joseph Traub took over for a while, followed by Phil Richards and Pete Bevin, Andy Doherty maintains it currently The same distribution contains patches by Sven Pechler to make it run on VMS. Larkin Lowrey wrote the OS/2 version, and Lindsey Smith wrote the MS-DOS version. Email addresses are in section 4. Q.1.3 Help! I don't understand how to use FSP! If you're already familiar with FTP, you might want to use one of the FTP-like clients instead, or even a graphical interface. See the answers to questions 2.1 and 2.2 below for details of how to get them. The following tutorial is adapted from an article in alt.comp.fsp by David DeSimone . The original FSP seems to have been designed for use with csh aliases, so if you use csh, try these aliases in your .cshrc: # FSP aliases: alias fcat '(set noglob; exec fcatcmd \!*)' alias fcd 'setenv FSP_DIR `(set noglob; exec fcdcmd \!*)`' alias fget '(set noglob; exec fgetcmd \!*)' alias fgrab '(set noglob; exec fgrabcmd \!*)' alias fls '(set noglob; exec flscmd -F \!*)' alias fll '(set noglob; exec flscmd -l \!*)' alias fpro '(set noglob; exec fprocmd \!*)' alias fpwd 'echo "$FSP_HOST ($FSP_PORT): $FSP_DIR"' alias frm '(set noglob; exec frmcmd \!*)' alias frmdir '(set noglob; exec frmdircmd \!*)' alias fhost 'set fsp_host=(\!*); source ~/bin/fhost; unset fsp_host' The last alias, "fhost", is my own invention, and the ~/bin/fhost file looks like this: #!/bin/csh # # Since this script sets environment variables, it really needs # to be source'd rather than executed. Thus the following alias # should be used: # # alias fhost 'set fsp_host=(\!*); source ~/.bin/fhost; unset fsp_host' # if ( $#fsp_host > 0 ) then setenv FSP_HOST $fsp_host[1] if ( $#fsp_host > 1 ) then setenv FSP_PORT $fsp_host[2] else setenv FSP_PORT 21 endif if ( $#fsp_host > 2 ) then setenv FSP_DIR $fsp_host[3] else setenv FSP_DIR / endif endif if ( $?FSP_HOST ) then echo "$FSP_HOST ($FSP_PORT): $FSP_DIR" endif This alias lets you "connect" to a host quickly and easily. For instance, to start out I give the following command: % fhost wuarchive.wustl.edu wuarchive.wustl.edu (21): / The "fhost" command tells me where I'm connected, on what port, and in what directory. Since all "fhost" does is set up some environemnt variables, we aren't REALLY connected. To find out if the site is responding, just do a quick "fls": % fls README etc/ mirrors2/ pub/ README.NFS graphics/ mirrors3/ systems/ edu/ mirrors/ private/ Looks like we're up and running! Navigating with FSP is now just like using the local filesystem, except the commands have "f" in front of them. For instance: % fcd /systems/amiga/incoming directory mode: (owner: some other machine)(delete: NO)(create: NO) % fls AT3D-Demo.bad devel/ utils/ AT3D-Demo.readme fish/ wb30/ comm/ programming/ demos/ text/ Other nice commands like "fcat filename" let me see what's out there, or for larger files, "fcat filename | less" is very effective. Once I see a nice file that I want copied to my local system, I just give the "fget filename" command and away it goes. Usually I type "fget filename &" which throws the transfer request into the background. Then I can immediately go off and "fcd" to some other directory and look for more files to grab, "fcat"-ing the README files and such. Q.1.4 What are those funny "R" and "I" characters? When FSP doesn't get any response from the server, it keeps on sending requests. The first time it retries, it prints an "R", (meaning "Retry"), and the second, third, and subsequent times, it prints an "I". You might also see an "E", which means "error": FSP got a packet, but it was corrupted for some reason. Fspclient does it slightly differently: it starts by printing "r" and "R" characters, and then uses "-\|/" characters to draw a spinning bar. As Phil Richards (the author) says, `I quite often see spinning bars, but usually only after the fifth pint'. Q.1.5 Why should I, as a site admin, run an FSP daemon? Because it's one more way people can access your site, and it won't cost you much extra load on the machine. The FSP daemon never forks, so it won't increase your load average by more than one. FSP doesn't add much to the network load either, and you can limit the amount of data the daemon will send out (eg, to 2.5k/sec). FSP allows comprehensive logging, running off inetd, README files per directory, banning on per-host or per-network basis, reverse naming and read-only sites. The only thing anonymous FTP gives that FSP doesn't is having the user type in an email address, and of course, this can easily be faked. FSP logs give the user's hostname, which is harder to fake. Q.1.6 Why do FSP clients appear to hang sometimes ? When unable to get a response to it's last request the FSP clients use a non-linear algorithm to increase the delay until they re-try. Effectively this means that during a transfer a client may appear to be sitting their doing nothing for periods of time, as the timeout they use increases to high values, to paraphrase Wen-King Su - "the algorithm is brain damaged". Hopefully this problem will be addressed in the next major release of FSP. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 2: FSP software and resources Q.2.1 Where can I get an FTP-like interface for FSP? Phil Richards' fspclient. The latest version (still pre-alpha, but more reliable than your average beta release) is fspclient.0.0-h. You can get it by FTP from ftp.robots.ox.ac.uk as /pub/ox.src/fspclient/fspclient.0.0-h+.tar.Z and via FSP from ftp.germany.eu.net:2001 /pub/network/inet/fsp/* Another interface to use is Nicolai Langfeldt's 'fspcli'. It has a ftp like interface and more. It is in the release directory on ftp.germany, and it has also been posted on alt.sources. Another nice thing about it is that it's a small(ish) perl script rather than a large compiled executable, and it's not alpha OR beta. Presently the latest version is 1.2.1 Ove Ruben R Olsen has written a client quite similar to Nicolai's, but even smaller. It is available in the fspsh directory on taxus.uib.no/9000 (see below). Note that if you want to use either of the last two clients, you'll have to have the Perl language installed. You can get the latest version by FTP from prep.ai.mit.edu in /pub/gnu/perl*, or from most sites which mirror GNU, such as ftp.germany . Q.2.2 Where can I get a graphical interface for FSP? 2.2.1 For Unix (X-Windows) ... The interface I use is FSPtool (not suprising really :-) ) by myself [Andy Doherty ]. It is an XView based client for the X Window System. Available from ftp.germany.eu.net as `/pub/network/inet/fsp/fsptool-1.6.1.tar.gz', or via FTP from ftp.x.org `/contrib/fsptool-1.6.1.tar.gz'. Like fspcli and fspshell, it acts as an interface to the standard FSP shell commands, rather than rewriting them itself. Note that to use this package, you will need the XView libraries, if you're using a Sun workstation, or the standard MIT X11R5/R6 distribution you should be you're OK: otherwise, you might have to get and compile them yourself. 2.2.2 For MS-Windows ... winfsp12.zip by Ian Heath is a MSW client using WINSOCK.DLL . It's available via FTP from wuarchive.wustl.edu "/systems/ibmpc/win3/winsock/winfsp12.zip" and ftp.cica.indiana.edu "/pub/pc/win3/winsock/winfsp12.zip". 2.2.3 For OS/2 ... If you're an OS/2 user, you can use the OS/2 client by Albert Crosby . It wraps around the OS/2 FSP software (see 2.1), and also requires RexxMenu and RxU. It can read a list of files in the standard FSP host listing format, and uses RexxMenu's point-and-click interface. Alternatively Larkin Lowrey has an OS/2 FSP client (version 1.0). The archive can be found on ftp.cdrom.com as `/pub/os2/new/fsp2-10.zip'. This version includes clients for IBM's TCP/IP 1.2.1 and TCP/IP 2.0. Both are 32-bit and fully handle longfilenames. 2.2.4 For the Macintosh ... Jim Browne (jbrowne@uiuc.edu) is working on a version for the Macintosh, this is still in Beta version and hasn't yet been released to the waiting masses ... if you're interested you can ask to be put on a mailing list by mailing him at jbrowne@uiuc.edu Q.2.3 Where can I get hold of a list of sites? There is a list, maintained by , which you can get hold of by fsp from ftp.Germany.EU.net (port 2001):/pub/lists/fsp-servers. Various other people produce lists as well: have a look around! You are encouraged to post site information to alt.comp.fsp, and if you post in the format shown later, most people will be able to slurp your list straight into their front-end programs. There's an unofficial standard for the format, which you can find on taxus in the file "fsplist.std". Dan Charrois runs a FSP site list service which allows updates, alterations and listings to be made via email. For instructions on using the FSP Site server, send email to charro@ee.ualberta.ca with the subject 'fsp list' and the word 'help' on a line by itself. You are strongly encouraged to make use of this service as it's in danger of shutting down through lack of use - despite being possibly the best way of maintaining an up to date list of open sites. In the meantime, a small list sites can be found in section 5. Q.2.4 Where can I get pictures of naked women in compromising positions and a copy of SuperRoboTermiSonicBuster II ? Don't ask me, I only edit the FAQ :-) Seriously, FSP has a reputation of being for "crooks and perverts". If you know any sites carrying illegal material, then do them a favour and keep them to yourself. Posting them won't make you any friends. If someone posts a list of sites, and you didn't want them to, please don't publicly flame them. It doesn't endear you to anyone. If you must put them right, send email. Thank you. Q.2.5 What about FSP v.3.0 ? The revision of the FSP protocol to version 3.0 is currently on- going. Forums for discussion are the alt.comp.fsp newsgroup and the fsp-discussion@germany.eu.net mailing list. Current work in progress includes an FSP RFC (Request For Comments) - basically an internet specification of the protocol; alterations to improve security facilities; miscellanous extra features and facilities. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Eric Sasaki - IBM Co-op || esasaki@nyx10.cs.du.edu / gt7294b@prism.gatech.edu Georgia Tech INTA major || http://nyx10.cs.du.edu:8001/~esasaki/home.html "More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt