At the risk of embarrassing myself, I have a very simple question.

I am trying to connect to my local machine using FTP? This is possible, right? How can I determine my machine name's correct name, if using the syntax:

ftp> open machine

I tried going to the "System" area of the control panel but the name of the machine given there is not working.

Thank you very much.

if you don't have a nameserver or your hosts file isn't set up with names, you can use the IP. so for example it might look something like this:

This of course assumes you have an ftp server daemon running on your system.

When you say "connect to my local machine do you mean you are trying to ftp to the same sytem you are running the ftp client on? What exactly are you trying to accomplish? There are other ways of copying files around a network, such as scp, that may work better for you.

that would help!

What I'm actually trying to do is FTP files from a remote server, to my local machine.

I tried typing in lftp and it didn't recognize the command.

So I typed in ftp>

open my.ip.address. (by this I mean the IP address of my machine)

and I got the message "Connection refused".

I'm sorry, I'm just a little confused. thanks

OK, if you're logged into your local machine and you want to initiate an ftp connection to a remote server you type:

ftp remote.ip.address

or

ftp remote.machine.name

Assuming you get connected you can then cd to whatever directory you want to and start issuing get/mget commands to retireve the files you want.

I really appreciate this.

I should have mentioned - to be specific- that I am using Putty, and I am logged in as root, to the remote machine/server. I want to pull files from the remote machine, to my local machine, the actual one that I am working on right now.

So I typed:

ftp remoteservername

and got connected no problem.

Then I tried to cd to a directory, and it prompted me for a password. I tried using the root password, but it said login failed.

I'm so sorry if I am confusing you. I just want to take files from the remote server and put them on my machine here. I might be barking up the wrong tree with this.

here's whayt you'll want to do:

ftp
open remote.machine.ip
user USERNAME
Password
cd DIR
get FILENAME

for additional commands, type help

OK, that's a bit strange. Let's clarify what's going on here. Let me know if this is all true:

1. You are logged onto a local linux system

2. You are trying to retrieve files off of a remote server

If those two statements are true, forget the Putty connection to the remote system. You will use ftp to connect and retrieve the files; you don't need to be logged into it to make this work.

You mean you got an ftp connection established without it asking you for any kind of Name or Password? That sounds fishy.

I am logged into my local machine (my desktop computer), but I am logged into the remote server as root, using Putty.

The basis for me trying this is that I've been trying to download enormous .gz files from the remote server onto our network drive (G, and it literally takes hours just for one file to download. I figured trying this via the command line might quicken the process a little bit.

Oops, I mean downloading the files via <b>WinSCP3</b> was taking hours.

OK, I think I understand this now: you're on a Windows PC using PuTTY to establish a secure ssh tunnel to the remote server. You are currently using WinScp to copy files back and forth.

A few points to consider:

1. ftp is not a secure protocol. If you need your files to be safe as they traverse the network (Internet?) between the remote system and your PC then don't use ftp. It is possible to make ftp work over the ssh tunnel, but it requires configuration that I'm not familiar with.

2. Command line ftp is not likely to be a *lot* faster than WinScp. Straight ftp won't be encrypting anything, but that probably isn't slowing you down much unless the processors on the two systems are really slow or overloaded.

Can you establish a direct (non-ssh tunnel) connection to the remote server? The ftp commands should be the same if you run them from a DOS command window. You don't need to be logged into the remote system at all to establish an ftp connection to it.

Yes, you're on target .... thank you for the advice. As long as I probably won't be gaining much speed ftp-ing over the command line, I'm not going to research it further at this point. I am going to try a few other things to make sure I've got the most efficient connection.

Thank you SO much for your time and help, Dsegel!