Welcome to the usage description of
jftpgw FTP proxy 0.13.5
Last update: Sat Jun 5 21:55:29 CEST 2004
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Joachim Wieland
Configuring and Compiling
jftpgw comes with an automake/autoconf "configure" shell script that creates the Makefile. First, run a
    ./configure --help
to see all the possible options. If you're running your own server you can probably run
    ./configure
without any options. If you have only user privileges, have a look at these switches:

  --prefix=PREFIX         install architecture-independent files in PREFIX
                          [/usr/local]
  [...]
  --sysconfdir=DIR        read-only single-machine data in DIR [PREFIX/etc]
  [...]
  --with-logpath=path     Specify the path of the log files (this affects only
                             the sample configfile
So if you only have write permission to your home directory you may want to create a directory jftpgw/ with subdirectories called etc/ and log/ for the configuration files and the log files. The binary gets installed in PREFIX/bin/ so you may want to specify that option, too.

A sample ./configure call of a regular user would be

    ./configure --prefix=/home/user --sysconfdir=/home/user/jftpgw/etc/ \
    --with-logpath=/home/user/jftpgw/log/
If configure stops at some point you can have a look at config.log to examine the problem. If it succeeds and creates the Makefile, you can run
    make all install
to compile jftpgw and install the binary in the specified PREFIX/bin directory.

The next step is to edit the configuration file with your favorite editor (I use "vi" in the examples):

    vi /home/user/jftpgw/conf/jftpgw.conf
The configuration files are documented, please read the instructions there.

Run the jftpgw binary to start the proxy daemon

Logging in to the jftpgw proxy
In general, the login string is
    user@targethost
. But that is not sufficient in some cases. Maybe you want to log in to another port on the targetmachine. You may also specify a port like in the following example
    user@targethost:port
There is a nuisance if you use Netscape or another browser to use FTP over a proxy: These programs have a similar URL for FTP servers. So we must be able to replace the characters that separate the user, the hostname and the port number. jftpgw allows you to use a comma to do that. The following logins are all valid:
    user@host,port
    user@host:port
    user,host:port
    user,host,port
Okay, let's say jftpgw runs on the host foo.bar.com on port 2370 and you want to connect to sunsite.unc.edu on port 21 as the user "anonymous" using Netscape. The URL would look like this:
    ftp://anonymous,sunsite.unc.edu,21@foo.bar.com:2370
In another example we connect to the jftpgw proxy on jftpgw.host.com on port 2370, let it log in to targethost as user user on port 3454 and send passwd as the password.
    ftp://user,targethost,3454:passwd@jftpgw.host.com:2370
Now, in order to confuse the reader a little bit more, we also specify the transfer mode (active or passive) in the login string from above. You just append a :a for active FTP or a :p for passive FTP. And yes, you guessed it already, you may also use a comma that is not interpreted by a browser:
    ftp://user,targethost,3454,a:passwd@jftpgw.host.com:2370
If you want to use jftpgw with another FTP proxy, you can embrace the user name in quotation marks in the login string as in
    "user@host"@jftpgwhost
Please note that you can also simplify the login by changing the configuration file. You can reduce our complicated login from above
    ftp://user,targethost,3454,a@jftpgw.host.com:2370
to a simple
   ftp://user@jftpgw.host.com:2370
in Netscape by setting the following configuration options in the configuration file. Set
forward to targethost,
serverport to 3454,
defaultmode to active.
Controlling the daemon
You can send the main jftpgw program (the one you started first) a SIGHUP signal. This causes the server to reread the configuraton files for further connects. jftpgw processes that are handling a connection are not affected by this signal.
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