File transfer protocol is used primarily for transferring binary files reliably and error free. Imagine an e-mail message you might send to a friend. This is a text-based file, much like what you’re reading now. However, files like programs, digital audio and graphics aren’t text. They are a stream of what would appear as garbage characters in a text editor and are very sensitive to changes in the format of the file. If one "character" is out of place, the file can be corrupt and useless. Therefore, a special handling system was developed to transfer these files with guarantee of non-corruption. This is the purpose of FTP. FTP sessions are very often performed by your WWW browser in the background as you retrieve pages and information.

Why would you want to use an FTP client? One example would be a site on the Internet at ftp.cdrom.com. This is an unbelievably huge site packed full of shareware games, utilities and other programs. If you are looking for non-commercial software of any kind, ftp.cdrom.com is the place to go. There are other such sites as these all over the Internet, some packed full and some that have no use to the average person.

There are various FTP clients out there such as WSFTP and CuteFTP. They all operate in basically the same way. You have two windows, one which is a view of your local hard drive, and the other is a view of the hard drive on the FTP site you are connected to. You can either transfer files from your system to the remote system (upload) or transfer files from the remote system to yours (download). However, raw FTP sessions are not the most user friendly. You need a basic knowledge of files, directories and how to navigate through them. You will probably also need at least a general knowledge of compression programs such as Pkzip or ARJ. See the section on file compression for details.

Above is a capture of the initial connect screen for the FTP client program, WSFTP. You'll notice it's configured to connect to ftp.durham.net, anonymously. Anonymous logins are a way of letting anybody into the FTP server. Unlike e-mail, an account name and password are not required. The username is "Anonymous" and the password is your e-mail address.

Once you're connected, the right side of the window contains the files and/or directories on the remote FTP server. The left side contains the files/directories on your computer. You navigate through the directories by double clicking on them. To actually transfer a file, you highlight the file(s) you want to transfer on one side, and click the arrow between the two windows that points to the other side. To download a file to your computer, Click the button that points to the left. Once you're finished, the "Close" button will disconnect you properly from the FTP server. You can then Exit the FTP program or Connect to a different FTP server.

If you want to experiment with FTP, you can play with our FTP server, ftp.durham.net. If you’re using a client such as WSFTP, somewhere it will ask you for a host name. Here you enter ftp.durham.net. For public servers such as ours, we can’t assign a username and password for everyone in the world that might hit the server. Therefore, all public access FTP servers allow what is known as an "Anonymous" login.

For the username you enter "anonymous", and for the password you enter your e-mail address (i.e. joe@durham.net). Almost all FTP clients have a check box marked "Anonymous" that changes the username/password fields for you.

You can also use a Web browser to access an FTP server directly. Normally when you want to hit a web site, you would use an address such as http://www.durham.net. To hit an FTP server, you use ftp://ftp.durham.net (for example). You enter this in your Web browser’s "location" or " address" box at the top of the browser window. Using this method will log you into the server anonymously automatically.

In either case, on most servers, you are left with a file listing with entries such as "bin", "incoming", "etc", "pub" and so on. These are directories on the remote system. Most of these are meaningless to the average person but the ones that concern you the most are "incoming" and "pub". The incoming directory is used for receiving files from you, if you choose to upload a file for some reason. The "pub" directory is for public files. If you (double?) click on this directory, it will contain other directories such as games, utilities, etc. etc. Within these may be other directories or listings of files you can download to your system. Usually clicking (once or double, depending on the FTP client used) will start the transfer of the file. Somewhere you will get a status window telling you the progress of the file transfer. These transfers can take a few seconds or many hours, depending on the size of the file(s) you are transferring and your transmission speed.

You may run in to some difficulties logging in to some servers. Somewhere on an FTP client window, there will be a small section that displays the status of your session. That is, what commands are being exchanged between the FTP client and server such as log in, directory changes and so on. You'll see this section in the image above, above the Close button. Some servers limit the number of anonymous users allowed on at once. Others don’t allow anonymous access at all, and are private servers. If you can’t log into an FTP server, check the status area. It may report something like "Anonymous access denied", "Too many anonymous logins" or "cannot get host name ftp.durhm.net". You’ll notice the latter example has the address misspelled.

We realize the above is very sketchy. FTP is not the most user-friendly service in the world, but used through a web browser instead of a stand alone client program you might have more luck. If you know how to "download" files and use pkzip/winzip etc., most of this should be familiar. If you’re completely confused, you can call support for general questions.