I login to borland ftp host in a VC++ (Windows OS) with

host name: ftp.borland.com
user name: anonymous
password: myname@borland.com

I found some html iles there, one of them is

ftp : / / ftp . borland.com/pub/bcppbuilder/devsupport/patches/bcpp4/english/fixes.html

of course owner (not me) of the html file wants users to visit the file by http.

could you tell me how to visit the html page by tech rules if I only know its ftp address?

actually i have visited the page already by changing first ftp to http and second to www - but I think it is only available in this particular case and not sutable for all cases - in other words, I need a rule to browse a html page if I know its ftp address.

another funny thing is that VC++ function says host name of "ftp borland.com" is "12346.ftp.storage.akadns.net", what is that?

ftp.domain.com
www.domain.com

Both point to the same domain. Not all web sites have a public FTP site associated with them so these aren't generally inter-swappable.

So replacing 'ftp.' with 'www.' is usually a good 'un when the remote file is HTML based, or viewable in a browser.

If you want to download the file (rather than display it) then ftp is the usual mechanism.

Andrew

It's up to whoever setup their server as to how or if theres a way to accesss the HTTP and FTP files and where they will be at.. so there is no fixed rule for how this will work.


the second 'Q' there may be several ftp servers with the same information and when you go to ftp.borland.com you are redirected to one of the many available servers. There are a couple other possibilites for the name difference as well. DNS is a wonderful thing.

Just think Google has 114,000 Intel blade servers, but you always go to www.google.com..