CSE Anonymous FTP service
Introduction
If you are in need of transferring files between you and remote users for your research, but sending or getting them through email or setting your own ftp server would be troublesome, you can use CSE anonymous ftp service. The service is available only to research users.
The anonymous ftp service at ftp.cs.washington.edu or at URL ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu allows any Internet user to retrieve and/or deposit files in a specified area without the need to have a CSE account. The ftp user can use a ftp command to access the service with anonymous as the account name, and an email address as its password. A line command such as wget or fetch or a web browser can also be used to access anonymous ftp files by the URL (please see man pages or help facility of individual commands for details.)
On CSE systems, the ftp directories are accessible via its Unix global path /cse/ftp/, where you can copy files into and out of it. On the other hand, an anonymous ftp user can only transfer files in one direction in each ftp directory. That is a file can be deposited but can not be retrieved and vice versa. This is to prevent our server from being a dumping ground for pirated software and other things to be shared by other anonymous ftp users.
There are two types of users described below.
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Short-term use
To use the service, there are a couple of self-serve directories that you can use right away for small-size files and for a short duration. They are incoming and outgoing directories for ftp users to deposit and retrieve files respectively. The directories are accessible to CSE users as /cse/ftp/incoming and /cse/ftp/outgoing respectively.
For transferring file to you, tell your user to put file in incoming and you can get the file from /cse/ftp/incoming.
For transferring file to ftp user, you can put your files in /cse/ftp/outgoing. If you are concerned the files might be copied by non-intended ftp users, you might want to protect the files by creating an unbrowsable directory under /cse/ftp/outgoing, and putting the files there.
Assuming you have the default umask, i.e., 022, an unbrowsable directory is just the same directory just as you would normally create but it is not world readable. Here is an example on how to make file myfile available to a ftp user in an unbrowsable myftp directory:
mkdir /cse/ftp/outgoing/myftp
chmod o-r /cse/ftp/outgoing/myftp
cp myfile /cse/ftp/outgoing/myftp/myfile
Once you copy your files into the directory, then you tell your ftp user what the path is. With the example above, the path would be /outgoing/myftp/myfile or URL ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/outgoing/toftp/myfile.
You can't remove files that are not owned by you so you can't remove files deposited by a ftp user after you have copied the file. However, you do not need to worry. When the files are older than 5 days, they are automatically removed.
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Long-term use
If you need to use ftp on a regular basis such as you have a URL of your project file published in a paper or you have large files or large amount of files that can't be handled comfortably by the server's disk, you can request to support@cs to either have your ftp directory set up or make files available in /cse/ftp/pub for you. Your files can be either on the ftp server disk or on your disk and NFS-mounted on the ftp server.
There are two directories for the purpose: /pub and /home. The /pub directory contains project files or path to project files, and the /home directory contains subdirectories organized by account names. Due to spam and security concerns, account names and /home directory are not listed to ftp users. The users must know the exact path in order to get to your directory and files.
Once you have the directory, you can add or structure your directory anyway you like. However, due to protection to all ftp area, a ftp user cannot write or deposit files into your directory even when it is world-writable. If you want to set up an area for your ftp user to deposit files, you must also mention the depository directory path in the request to have your ftp directory set up so that the ftp server can be configured to allow the depositing.
Your files can stay in the ftp directory as long as you are a current CSE account holder. However, other factors could shorten the time such as when the host or ftp directory exported to the ftp server is no longer available.
Below is a summary of ftp directory structure as appears to ftp users
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Ftp directory structure
Other files and directories, which may also be seen by a ftp user, are historical artifacts or for system use.
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