Anonymous FTP

Anonymous FTP is a technique for retrieving publicly available files and programs from the many FTP servers around the Internet. Anonymous FTP is simply an ftp session in which you log into the remote server using the username anonymous and, by convention, your email address as the password.[47] The anonymous FTP example shown here should make this process clear:

C:\>ftp ds.internic.net
Connected to ds.internic.net.
220 FTP server Wed May 21 1997 ready.
Name (ds.internic.net:kathy): anonymous
331 Guest login ok, use email address as password.
Password: kathy@ttgnet.com
ftp> cd rfc
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> get rfc1122.txt
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening connection for rfc1122.txt.
226 Transfer complete.
local: rfc1122.txt remote: rfc1122.txt
ftp> quit
221 Goodbye.

In this example, the user logs into the server ds.internic.net using the username anonymous and the password kathy@ttgnet.com, which is her email address. With anonymous FTP, she can log in even though she doesn’t have an account on ds.internic.net. Of course what she can do is restricted, but she can retrieve certain files from the system, and that’s just what she does. She changes to the rfc directory, and gets the file rfc1122.txt.

Using the anonymous FTP service offered by a remote server is very simple. However, setting up an anonymous FTP service on your own system is a little more complicated. The Microsoft FTP server is part of the Internet Information Server. See Chapter 10 for information ...

Get Windows NT TCP/IP Network Administration now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial