Wednesday, 09/04/02

I spent a bit of time today trying to get the FTP-as-filesystem support in Mac OS X 10.2 operational. In theory, one can mount an FTP-accessible volume in the Finder by plugging in an FTP URL at the Finder's "Connect to Server" dialog, which prompts for a password if the URL takes the form, "ftp://username@destination.com/path/". There's also a /sbin/mount_ftp terminal command, alongside the many related mount commands that existed in 10.1.

mount_ftp, unlike its binary brethren, is a Perl script. It wraps /System/Library/Filesystems/ftp.fs/csmount, and the author was evidently a C bloke not too sure of his perl chops, as it includes this adorable commented block:

#print "this is a test:" . @ARGV . "\n";
#for (my $i = 0; $i < @ARGV; $i++) {
#       print $ARGV[$i] . "\n";
#}

Unfortunately, both FTP mechanisms seem outrageously buggy. Volumes mounted from the terminal are functional but resist unmounting through the normal 'umount <path>' mechanism: umount complains that the path isn't currently mounted even when 'mount' claims otherwise. Like all volumes mounted from the terminal, the mount points aren't usable from the Finder, which sees only a unix file there.

The Finder support, in about half a dozen tries, succeeded once. Once it had no apparent effect, and four times the computer locked up to the point that the Dock wouldn't appear and inbound SSH sessions couldn't complete. I had to use the hard reset button.

The one time Finder did successfully mount an FTP volume, I brought up my home directory at my web host. Infuriatingly, the only directories I could traverse were the ones in which group and/or universal privileges were set. There's no earthly reason why it can't let me into a directory whose privileges were restricted to owner, because I was logged in as the owner (otherwise I wouldn't have been able to see the directory at all).

I had expected that the moderately tricky bit would be protecting the password with an SSH tunnel, but I didn't even get to that point. Here's hoping this stuff works better in the inevitable 10.2.1 release. 02:46PM «

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