Creating and Using a Personal ftp Directory

You may wish to establish a personal ftp directory to make documents and software available to your colleagues via anonymous ftp. Items in this directory can also be accessed directly from a web browser or from links on your Web pages.

To get an ftp directory, you need to have a faculty or graduate student account on the MSCS network. To learn about getting such an account read the accounts and general information web page.

Once you have an account, send email to consult@math.uic.edu requesting that a directory be created for you on the department's ftp server. You will be notified when your directory is created; usually within two days of your request.

There are three main ways to put files into this directory:

1. If the files you want to make available are already in your home directory on the MSCS network, you need only login and copy the files or directories you wish to make available into the directory /home/ftp/pub/<username>, where <username> stands for your username on the MSCS network. (If you are logging in to math.uic.edu from home, please use ssh to protect your password from sniffers. To obtain ssh for your home computer see our web page about secure access to your MSCS account. )

   You may change the contents of your public ftp directory the same way you would change files in your home directory. For example, you couldcd to /home/ftp/pub/<username> and use rm to remove files and mv to rename them.

2. If you have a PC in your office, we can arrange to map your ftp directory to a letter drive on your office PC. You can then use Windows Explorer to copy files from your PC to your ftp directory. Write to consult@math.uic.edu to request this arrangement.

3. If the files you want to make available are not in your MSCS home directory nor on your office PC, use ftp or Fetch or some other file transfer program to connect to the machine math.uic.edu. Provide your own MSCS username and password. Put the files you want to share in /home/ftp/pub/<username>, where <username> stands for your username on the MSCS network. Please be aware that ftp connections do not encrypt passwords, so this procedure exposes your password to any sniffers that may be running on the UIC network.

Your colleagues can access the files in your ftp directory by using ftp or Fetch to connect to ftp.math.uic.edu. They should use the username ftp and provide their email address as their password.

To create links to these files from your Web page, use a URL of the form:

ftp://ftp.math.uic.edu/pub/<username>/<filename>.

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