Re: Identifying End of Tx in FTP

[Bennett Todd <bet () rahul net>]

1998-05-25-19:13:49 Laris Benkis:
> We have a system in place where clients drop off files via FTP to a
> wu-ftp server which are then processed automatically by scripts. Files
> have to be processed relatively quickly for the application to work
> properly therefore the convention we have developed is to indicate end
> of transmission by doing a rename of the file once the initial put is done. 

That's an approach I hadn't thought of. Cool!

> We are trying to tighten the security of the whole process and want to
> use FW1 ftp resources to limit where puts can be done.  Unfortunately it
> turns out that when the ftp resources are used it is no longer possible to
> do rename.  

So you're gonna have to change the client behavior for sure --- unless
the client code implementation currently ignores the errors the failing
rename attept produces.

> What is a reliable, transparent way to tell that an ftp transmission has
> been completed?

A question I've pondered before --- having done the same kind o' stuff,
ftp-ing files into a directory where they were then automatically
processed.

> We have a fallback solution where the client would send a file then
> send a second delimiter file to indicate that the transmission of the
> first file is complete.

That's what I ended up doing.

But I just had another idea hit me --- wu-ftpd has highly-configurable
logging, it's easy to get it to log every transfer. So do so, and then
bolt a log-watcher on, and let the appearance of the log message
describing the completed transfer trigger the spool file processor.

-Bennett