ftp

[Guy Harris]

> >      The general ftp discussion really doesn't belong on this mailing
> > list.  However, you are directed to see your local ftp guru or peruse
> > documentation available online at the nic.
> 
> Then where does the discussion belong?  The guidelines provided in the
> most recent edition of the recurring publication "List of Active Newsgroups"
> in mod.newslists says that this is a UNIX* neophytes group.

Unfortunately, "this" is two things; it's a UNIX neophytes group for
USENET (net.unix), and it's a UNIX neophytes mailing list for the
ARPANET (INFO-UNIX), which happen to be gatewayed to one another.  The
references to a "local FTP guru" and to the NIC are all well and good
(sort of) for INFO-UNIX, but could be useless for most readers of
"net.unix".

> Someone wrote in here a while back something like "I'm on a uucp-only
> site...can I ftp to someplace like <some sitename>??"  I think that
> this is a reasonable question, which the documentation *should* answer
> in non-computerese, but doesn't.

It's not clear whether the FTP documentation should tell the user that
ARPANET sites are accessible only from ARPANET sites (replace "ARPANET"
with "Internet" if appropriate).  The best place to put things like this
is in the articles/documentation for new users of USENET, and in whatever
similar things exist for ARPANET mailing list recipients.

The crux of the biscuit here is that we have several independent communities
reading net.unix/INFO-UNIX; what is perfectly straightforward for one
community may not mean anything to the other community.  The user who
triggered this whole discussion really *wanted* to ask the same question
you mention, but didn't know enough to ask it.  (It's sort of like
the people who ask questions about "context diffs" and get answered with
"use 'diff -c'"; a perfectly legitimate answer, but only if the person
being answered is running the Berkeley version of "diff".)

(BTW, for the benefit of people out there, the answer to the question "can
I FTP to some place like <some sitename>" is probably "no", unless your
site is on the ARPANET/Internet.  You'll have to ask somebody who *is*
on the ARPANET to do it for you.)

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy