What do these three things have in common? Well, there's a story behind it.
At a site where I work there are a couple of ancient Apollo workstations running Domain OS, a Unix-like OS. This OS had an early networked filesystem where the super-root is called // and hosts have their filesystems underneath this. E.g. if you have two workstations named ws1 and ws2, their roots will be at //ws1 and //ws2.
Users needed to connect to the workstation filesystem using FTP. I proposed Filezilla as a replacement for an older, less friendly client. A side note, you need to use active mode FTP when connecting to this old FTP server. We could login fine and get a directory listing, but when we tried to enter a directory by clicking on the folder icon, we would get an error like: /ws1 not found. Looking at the command stream it was obvious what was going wrong. Filezilla was issuing CWD /ws1 when it should be CWD //ws1.
How to get Filezilla to either 1. use relative paths for CWD, or 2. understand that the root is //, not /? There was no option to use relative paths, it seems that Filezilla always converts paths to absolute ones for CWD. By trial and error I discovered that Cygwin has by coincidence the same pathname convention, // is the super-root. So by setting the Server Type to Cygwin in the Site Manager entry for this Apollo workstation, Filezilla connections worked.
So that's the connection. Hope this tip helps you if you happen to have to connect to a Domain OS FTP server with Filezilla.
At a site where I work there are a couple of ancient Apollo workstations running Domain OS, a Unix-like OS. This OS had an early networked filesystem where the super-root is called // and hosts have their filesystems underneath this. E.g. if you have two workstations named ws1 and ws2, their roots will be at //ws1 and //ws2.
Users needed to connect to the workstation filesystem using FTP. I proposed Filezilla as a replacement for an older, less friendly client. A side note, you need to use active mode FTP when connecting to this old FTP server. We could login fine and get a directory listing, but when we tried to enter a directory by clicking on the folder icon, we would get an error like: /ws1 not found. Looking at the command stream it was obvious what was going wrong. Filezilla was issuing CWD /ws1 when it should be CWD //ws1.
How to get Filezilla to either 1. use relative paths for CWD, or 2. understand that the root is //, not /? There was no option to use relative paths, it seems that Filezilla always converts paths to absolute ones for CWD. By trial and error I discovered that Cygwin has by coincidence the same pathname convention, // is the super-root. So by setting the Server Type to Cygwin in the Site Manager entry for this Apollo workstation, Filezilla connections worked.
So that's the connection. Hope this tip helps you if you happen to have to connect to a Domain OS FTP server with Filezilla.
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