I know this is a very tricky point ...
First some explanations:
We have a workstation cluster with about 150 machines that have
full email, news, irc, http and gopher access (via gateways) but no
telnet or ftp. We also run a ftp archive with about 3 GB (and growing)
software that we try to maintain very well and keep up to date.
This cluster is used for students in their first/second year.
We don't want to allow the users in this cluster ftp access until they
know more about the net and use the resources more "seriously". All
students after the second year (sometimes earlier) get access to fully
connected machines.
Therefor we do not gate ftp URLs but only gopher and http.
Now I have come across the problem that some sites allow complete
access to their FTP areas via http URLs.
The funny thing about that is that some of the sites are really restricted
about access to their anonymous ftp archive and one can easily bypass
this using the httpd instead of the ftpd.
Now my plea: Could we please use each protocol for what it was designed
for? I.e. use http for "information" and ftp for "files". I know that
the difference is rather fluent ...
\Maex
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______________________________________________________________________________
Markus Stumpf Markus.Stumpf@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE
http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~stumpf/