FTP problems

M

mrbigglesworth

Registered
I am trying to set up FTP to allow my windows XP PC to be able to retrieve files from my mac. I have almost 7.5 GB of mp3s that I want to be able to copy to the PC, but I have them all stored in a separate partion of my hard drive from OS X.
The built-in FTP seems to only let me log into my own directory. How can I get it to open up my /Volumes/Macintosh HD/ folder so that my PC can retrieve it. My OS X partition is only 5GB so I can't move the mp3s into my home directory. I have tried to create a shortcut in my home directory to the mp3 folder but windows can't follow the link after I log into the mac FTP.

THanks for your help!
 
Hey--it seems like you can solve this by creating a symbolic link. Open up Terminal and type in this line (substituting the correct name for "MyVolume"):

ln -s /Volumes/MyVolume linktovolume

Now when you FTP from your Windows machine to your Mac, you should see a file (it probably won't look like a folder in your FTP client) called linktovolume. Double-click it and it will take you to the right partition. This can worked with mounted disk images, too...
 
I tried what you suggested, and it did create a link to my other partition. However, the link is in the root directory. I copied the link into my home directory, but windows doesn't see the file at all - it sees all the other files in my home directory. Now I can't delete the original from the root directory "/Volumes/Mac OS X/" (it says privileges: system).
Anyone have other ideas? Also, how can I delete the original file in the root directory?
 
I got it deleted using the terminal, now does anyone have other ideas on how to get a working link? If I make an alias, my PC just tries to download the link file.
Thanks!
 
You should be able to navigate to /Volumes/volumename/mp3folder from your Windows machine without problem. By default on Mac OS X, any FTP user can escape out of their home directory (/Users/Username) and browse the entire contents of all hard disks. Just click on the menu that says "Username" and navigate to "/" (this takes you to the root level of your startup volume). Then enter the "/Volumes" directory and navigate to "/Volumes/volumename/mp3folder" from there (this allows you to traverse to another hard disk).

[Read-only access of all disk contents is an extremely poor choice on Apple's part from a security standpoint, but it can be corrected with an ftpchroot -- see the thread in the Darwin forum on that topic if you have further interest in it.]
 
One issue to be aware of, especially when transferring a large collection of files, is that Internet Explorer will be one of the slowest FTP clients for the task. A dedicated FTP client like Transmit or Anarchie would do a large job like transferring a number of MP3 files much more effeciently.

For, example here's a speed comparison of various FTP clients:

FTP Program / Download / Upload
Anarchie 3.5 / 40 sec / 50 sec
Transmit 1.5 / 43 sec / 50 sec
Netfinder 2.0 / 43 sec / 55 sec
Fetch 3.03 / 56 sec / 55 sec
Netscape 4.6 / 60 sec / 65 sec
Vicom FTP 3.0 / 70 sec / 66 sec
MSIE 4.5 / 85 sec / n/a*

Test file: 41 megabytes over 10BT ethernet
* IE 4.01 doesn't support file uploads

Speed may have improved with IE 5.2, but I can't imagine very substantially. It wouldn't be a top priority for the MS team to work on making their web browser a better FTP client, as it is secondary functionality for the program.
 
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