Re: 500 Command not understood?

Hi,

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, David Gibbs wrote:
>
> This program has worked fine for a long time ... I'm just trying to
> diagnose a problem.
>
> At this point I'm thinking it may be an exit program or a proxy.

I doubt it's an exit program, and I'll tell you why.  When the IBM OS/400
FTP server doesn't understand a command, it sends back a 500 response like
this:

ftp> quote XXXX crtlib foo
500 Subcommand XXXX not valid.

The message that you quoted to us was "500 command not understood" which
is perfectly valid, but is phrased a little bit differently, which makes
me think that you're not talking to the IBM FTP server.

As I said before, you might be talking to an FTP proxy.  Or, a whole
different platform -- though you've ruled that out.

Another thing that I just thought of -- you could be talking to an iSeries
that's running a 3rd party FTP server instead of the one that IBM includes
with OS/400.  I know that it's common for EDI software to provide an FTP
server.  I'm sure that there are other FTP servers available besides that
as well.  So, it's certainly possible that it's an iSeries, but not using
the FTP server that comes with OS/400.

All of these are very good reasons not to use "quote RCMD" in your FTP
scripts.  RCMD is not part of the FTP standard, it's an extension.  Try
"mkdir MYLIB" instead.  Or if you really like QUOTE, you can do the same
thing with "quote MKD MyLib" -- since that's a standard FTP command it
should work properly with 3rd party servers or through proxies.

If you do want to submit remote commands, don't use FTP to do it!  FTP is
not designed as an "Execute Remote Command" protocol -- use RExec instead.
i.e. RUNRMTCMD...

I've had two other questions from people in the past week asking me about
RCMD...  one person tryign to do it to a Unix system, and another trying
to do it on a Windows system.  Yikes!  RCMD is not a part of standard FTP.
FTP was never intended to be a "remote command" protocol.  It's a file
transfer protocol.