Re: FTP & firefox... -- WEB400

Does anyone know why I'm getting this message when trying to FTP to the
IFS of my V5R3 iSeries in FireFox?
The FTP server 215 OS/400 is the remote operating system.  The TCP/IP
version is "V5R3M0". is currently unsupported.

You just want me to tell you why that's happening, and not fix it at all?Great... that'll be my easiest job today.

The problem is that the FTP standard, when it was written, did notdesignate a particular format for the "list" subcommand. (When you typeDIR into an FTP client, it sends the LIST subcommand to the server.)

Anyway, there was no format designated for LIST. Instead, the FTP servercould send any format it wanted. The client was supposed to displaywhatever it was on the user's screen, so as long as the server returnedsomething that a user could read, all was well.

Here's the problem: People started writing GUI FTP clients that not onlydisplayed this screen, but also tried to interpret it's contents. Theprogram itself needed to know which part of the screen was the file type(so a lovely icon could be displayed) what part was the file's name, whatpart was the size of the file, etc, etc,etc. Since the format of thescreen isn't standardized, and the server can send anything it wants, thiscauses all sorts of weird code to be written.

The Firefox FTP software works by asking the server what type of server itis. In your example, the server is returning something like "The TCP/IPVersion is V5R3M0" or something like that. Each individual FTP serverreturns a different string to identify itself.

There's code in Firefox that looks at this string, and then inteprets thecontents of the directory differently, depending on the FTP server you'veconnected to. Since the format isn't standardized, it has to haveseparate code for each FTP server type.

The people who wrote firefox didn't write code to handle the OS/400 FTPserver -- so it's unrecognized, and you get the error.

As Simon pointed out, I wrote a patch that fixed this bug in Nvu which iscode that was originally taken from the same Mozilla project wherefirefox's roots come from. However, both projects have doubtless changedtheir code a little bit since then, so I don't know if that patch wouldhelp much, and at any rate, they'd have to incorporate it into firefox foryou, or you'd have to compile your own copy of firefox to incorporate achange like that. Possible, but somewhat difficult.

Since firefox isn't a very good FTP client, anyway, I have to wonder whyyou'd bother! If you want firefox to download something from youriSeries, use HTTP. If you want FTP access to your iSeries, use a betterFTP client! (FileZilla, for example).