Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!pinocchio.UUCP!bzs
From: bzs@pinocchio.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: FTP "STRU VMS" extension
Message-ID: <8902061636.AA13703@pinocchio.UUCP>
Date: 6 Feb 89 16:36:02 GMT
References: <602233186.0.KASHTAN@IU.AI.SRI.COM>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 34


What I don't understand is why this isn't taken care of extra-FTP by
some sort of archiving utility like tar.

How does one transfer ISAM (eg.) files by tape between VMS systems?
Why can't a similar mechanism be used?  The obvious advantage is that
such representations should even work when one wants to push such
files through third-party, non-VMS systems since all the info to
re-create the file gets bundled into the transferred file itself
rather than relying on wire transmission as server/client commands.

It wouldn't really occur to me to ask for an extension to FTP to
transfer an arbitrary file tree between Unix's (for example), I'd just
bundle it up with tar and send *that* (possibly compressing and/or
uuencoding if need be.) In fact, that's SOP.

At best I could imagine some sugar in the VMS server/clients which
might say "Hmm, that's a MUMBLE file, I'll spawn off a FROTZ command,
send the result of that, and if the other side is a VMS site he'll
recognize the header and automatically do the opposite", but none of
that needs a change in the protocol spec since it only affects the OS
interface, not the network interface (the file would just be xferred
binary I'd guess.) Personally I hate that kind of magic.

No FTP extensions should be needed (eg. something like embedding UNIX
magic numbers should do it.) And again, if the other side wasn't a VMS
site it would work also (that is, would store the file image but make
no attempt to unpack it.) A good example of the utility of this
approach is putting VMS files for Anonymous FTP onto a non-VMS system.

Isn't this the scheme that Unix tar, Macintosh PACKIT, MS/DOS ARC etc
have been using for years?

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||