I want to dial into merit and from there do ftp without first logging onto
(and using up funds from) my ub account.  Unfortunately I have a cpm
machine and haven't found any ftp programs for it (Kaypro II).  I do not want
to spend money.  Can it be done?  Is it hopeless?

15 responses total.

If you are a student of the UofM and have an interest in Internet access,
then the UMCC is just the ticket.  Non-students pay $7 a month and may have
to wait a short time for their acceptance into the club because of
student ratio quotas.

I seem to be saying this a lot these days:  I am not a student, and I don't
want to spend any money if I can help it.

Then it's probably hopeless.  The ftp program for the PC is much
bigger than 64 K.

What about us EMU students?  EMU's 0.8 MIP MicroVAX II is kinda annoying to
do much of anything with (Ultrix v3.0, anyone?).. I've got the proper hardware
for FTP (386SX, V.32bis), just need to know what programs are necessary and
what access is required. 
 (EMU: Mascots, not micros! <thpht>)

Unfortunately, Merit seems less interested in selling low-cost dialup
Internet access "for the masses" and more interested in selling high-cost
dedicated connections for big corporations.

I'd probably be willing to pay $10/month for Internet access -- but I
certainly am not willing to pay $10/month so Merit can keep an entry
in their database about me somewhere.  That's absurd.  Renting time on
a dialup IP connection is one thing; Merit charging artificially high
fees to discourage people from using their services is another.

I don't understand why the ftp stuff has to be bigger than 64k.  It's not
that complicated to do file-transfers, surely.  If someone can point me to
a source of information perhaps I can figure out how to do it.
 
I get the impression (from the outside) that ka9q has a lot more to it than
is necessary just to do file transfers.  Isn't that true?

  Yes, that's true.  The primary problem on an 8-bit machine is likely to be
getting the machine to keep up with the serial port at reasonable baud rates.

The code that acutally does the file transfers may be small, but you
also need code for the human interface, the serial port drivers, etc.
You also have to leave room for the BIOS, too, don't forget.  The
application itself is actually less than 64k.

Your main problem is that KA9Q is not a program expressly intended to do
file transfers, but rather a program that impliments a good portion of
the TCP/IP protocol suite as well as several user-level services, some
of which happen to include telnet and ftp.  If all KA9Q had to do was
the ftp protocol, it could probably be quite small (especially if you
stripped user-interface things out like m{get,put,ls}).  But KA9Q also
has to impliment TCP/IP, and the whole thing is stacked on top of a
multitasking "kernel" which allows it to deal elegantly with the
asychronous nature of TCP/IP networking.

I hate to tell you this, but most of the world stopped caring whether
applications run in 64K several years ago.  Hell, even Minix/386 has
removed the 64K+64K split I&D limitation.

   There is an FTP system available for CP/M machines, but I've never sctually
seen it here.  It was written in England, for I believe a Torch CP/M machine.
It is basically only FTP and nothing else.  The code design came from the ka9q
package but was written in assembley.  I have talked to an English ham who
has seen and used it, but I was so horrified/amused I just stood there and
listened.  If you are serious about this, get onto rec.ham-radio.packet and
ask there.  Several folks in the UK listen and perhaps will help you.

   But I have to agree with Marc's sentiments: why bother?  You'll spend
more free time than its worth trying to get the damed thing working on your
system.  Remember, CP/M programs are not all that compatible with each other
so you'll have to tweak it for your system.  Sigh.

The main reason why I bother is that I have a 64k cpm machine and don't have
any free cash.  Yes I know, time is money...at least in theory.

I got ka9q for the ST. It connects to merit all right. After ftp
um.cc.umich.edu, it responds with SYNC sent. After that nothing happens.
Any clue?

Ya - MTS isn't a good place to FTP to (or TELNET or ...)  Basically,
370 architecture machines were never real good at this type
of interactive I/O, & TCP/IP is something that's happened to
MTS late in its lifespan, mostly as commitment & support for
it is disappearing.  So, sure, it works.  Most of the time.  If
you don't look too hard at it.  Over ethernet, I've managed to
move large files around with a transfer speed of ~20K bytes/second,
which is actually not all that impressive.  Over SLFP connections,
I've seen far worse speeds.  At one point, I discovered I could
speed things up on SLFP by sending ICMP echo packets to MTS;
apparently, the extra activity did good things to MTS's IP support.

If you're just going after archives of things, there are other sites
far more worth trying out.  All of the stuff on PC1: etc., is definitely
duplicated elsewhere.  I don't have a list right handy, but if nobody
else has any ideas, I'll try to ship a list of interesting sites
over here in the next few days.  Hmmm.  "nis.merit.edu" might be
a good starting place.

I uploaded the latest version of internet sites into my directory. It is called
internet.sts

Steve will copy it soon somewhere else on the system, then I'll delete it.
You are welcome to download it, or if you seem to have a never version,
please upload it and let us know.

Since I still couldn't get ka9q working with merit and don't know of any
other hook to internet (!), I will try to take a look at the source, but
don't have much time these days for it.

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