Using FTP between home and Toons

    Some of you may want to work on your labs and assignments from home. In doing this, you may find in necessary or convenient to transfer files between your home directory on toons and your home computer. This is done using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software. Many programs exist for performing this function; WS-FTP, BulletProof FTP, and even a text based command from DOS called (unsuprisingly) "ftp" to name a few. The following are instructions for using WS-FTP to FTP between the toons domain and your home computer. You may have other FTP software on your machine at home but these instructions should be generic enough to help you configure those as well if you haven't already. WS-FTP can be downloaded from Ipswitch Software.

• Create a new Session Profile
  • After opening WS-FTP, click on the New button.
  • Name the profile ftp.toons.cs.wwu.edu
  • Put in ftp.toons.cs.wwu.edu as the hostname.
  • Put your toons username and password into the proper text boxes (check save password if you'd like)
  • Click on Save.
  • Click OK

You should now be connected to the the toons FTP server. The window on the the left is your local system. The window on the right is the remote system (as labeled).   On the both the remote system and local, the top window lists the directories within the current directory, and the bottom window lists the files within the current directory.

• Browse to your user directory (also called a folder)
  • On the remote system, scroll down on the directory listing and double click on Users.
  • On the remote system, scroll down to your user directory and double click on it.
  • Continue traversing directories until you find the one from which you'd like to place or retrieve files.

• Creating new directories (also called folders)
  • You can create subfolders in any folder for which you have permissions. Simply click on the MkDir button (Make Directory) while within the folder that you'd like the new subfolder to be placed in. After creating this subfolder you can open it and send files to it.
• Transfer the files
  • On your local system, browse to the directory from which you'd like to place or retrieve files.
  • Select the files from that you'd like to send from one system to the other.
  • Click on the appropriate arrow between the two systems to transfer the files.
  • That's it. After the files have transferred you can either Close the connection, or Exit the FTP software (or both). Or you can transfer more files.

When files are FTP'd into your directory the permissions for those files should be inherited from whatever directory they are placed in. But, if for some reason this is not the case, you can set the permissions manually.

Note: Many file systems use the characters ".."  (two periods) to represent a special type of directory, Windows and Unix flavors included.   Specifically, they represent the parent directory. That is... whatever directory you are in probably contains a directory called ".." which when opened takes you UP one level on the directory tree, instead of down one level. You will use this often when navigating directory structures in WS-FTP so be aware of it.