A Plea For Hosting

[Trylon]

Ok, I'm sensing major confusion here.

ULM does not require FTP for downloading. It requires FTP for uploading.
In fact, ULM was designed primarily for HTTP downloading and FTP uploading.
The ftp downloading was a feature that was added later on - (which probably explains why it's so crappy....)

This is because it is common practice for webhosts to provide FTP access to upload files that can be downloaded with HTTP again later on.

Now, the maintainers download site would probably work if they provided ftp upload access to a folder, which has http download access. (complex yeah, I know)

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I'm probably goign to need another solution for the new ULM. Perhaps some sort of http upload system that splits up large files in chunks of 5MiB and uploads them through http post requests, allowing for further processing and storage on the library server. (Unfortunately, it'd require a big webspace on the library server, though on the other hand, it does solve the hosting issue...)

[Chacal]

I'm not sure you want http upload, unless you can limit access. Otherwise anyone can upload anything.
I think your current scheme works well: we upload our Age somewhere, then enter that link as a mirror. It's up to us to find some space, and redundancy and security are taken care of.

What needs to be fixed is the FTP download, because not all servers support http. It is essential to be able to use a username and password for the FTP download.

[belford]

My experience running a server is that if anonymous upload is open, it'll be abused, whether FTP or HTTP. It should be safe to provide password-protected upload for either mode.

"not all servers support http"? I'm missing something here. What's the problem with having people download stuff via HTTP from the maintainer's site?

[Chacal]

You don't download the Age files from the ULM site, you download them from a mirror. If the mirror happens to run an http service, good. If not then you need FTP or something else.

[belford]

Can we just choose mirrors that support HTTP?

It's not like it's a rare service.

[Chacal]

What's rare is people willing to provide hundreds of Megs of server space and bandwidth for free.

[Trylon]

What's rare is people willing to provide hundreds of Megs of server space and bandwidth for free.

Very true - unfortunately...

[Nynaveve]

Well, since it appears that Andy has gotten the ULM to cooperate with the GoMa website, I don't think we'd have any problems providing hosting space on our server. We've got tons of it, and tons of transfer bandwidth (1200GB/mo).

I'll open up the offer to anyone who needs it that the GoMa can provide free hosting space for Ages. Just shoot me a PM here or on the GoMa forum, and I'll send you the info you'll need.