>Those double firewalls deny common file transfer mechanisms for a
>reason. I have to side with you network administrator on this.
Actually, the firewall denies very little per se. It's a double-NAT
firewall. The Mac which I want to connect on is on 192.168.*, behind a NAT
gateway which interfaces to the main student LAN on 10.38.*, which itself
is behind a NAT gateway to the Internet. There is less "security" reason
for the firewalls than a simple lack of IPv4 address space.
>> There is a *very* simple FTP client built into Windows, but it's hardly
>> easy to use.
>
>If by easy you mean GUI then you are correct, it is non-GUI. However,
>typical transfers require approximately 3 commands to be typed.
Which the average Joe user doesn't know and would have a hard time figuring
out or remembering. Have you ever tried explaining to an average Joe why
they need to turn on binary mode? I've seen Computer Science undergraduate
students who didn't fully grasp that one for a while, so why should a
secretary?
>> BTW, even NetPresenz is shareware.
>
>Are you arguing that all software should be free?
No, I was simply pointing out that FTP servers are complex enough that the
authors want compensation. NetPresenz is a fairly good and simple server,
and it's shareware.
>> Secure connections, which are
>> the other "big want" right now, will need more than that due to the complex
>> encryption algorithms involved
>
>This is doubtfull since most of the encryption algorithms commercially
>used today comprise of few lines of code.
Point taken, and that makes the argument for including proper security
stronger. I think I had the (very large) OpenSSL library in mind, which
wouldn't be appropriate, but there is still a little overhead for setting
up and maintaining the secure channel, besides the algorithm itself.
BTW, is RC5 GPL-compatible and (from a US perspective) exportable?
>> I think even "power users" like myself would love to have such a
>> description, especially in the case where (as at present) no file-transfer
>> facility is available at the VNC level, or that functionality has been
>> disabled. Sometimes we have to work with unfamiliar platforms, too.
>
>Why will "power users" like you not provide such a description then?
Because at the moment no generic solution exists, and nobody has the time
or motivation to sit down and figure out *all* the possible combinations.
We'd much rather produce ideas on how to do it generically, which in this
case involves adding to VNC. Since we ARE power users, and in several
cases programmers, our generic solution supports more than just the simple
cases, and IMO doesn't take much of the undesirable 'code bloat'.
In case you were wondering, it actually takes less code or executable size
to add a function to a related application than to provide a totally
separate application. This is less true on UNIX systems (where the
overhead is only a few Kb) but is definitely true on Windows and
overwhelmingly true on the Mac (a do-nothing app built using PowerPlant
takes up 200K, the executable-size increase for the file-transfer could be
as little as 10K).
--------------------------------------------------------------
from: Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (not for attachments)
big-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
uni-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it.
Get VNC Server for Macintosh from http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/vnc/
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