[Kc] Fwd: RE: Yet another ftp site: ftp://ftp.chatnfiles.com

[Tom Miller]

Hi, anyone want to help Oliver? His ftp search site: www.filewatcher.org keeps track of 450 million ftp-able files including lots of Linux stuff.  I have a 771,000+ ftp archive that his scanner hickups on so he is going to re-write it.....

Tom Miller

Oliver Maruhn <oliver at maruhn.com> wrote: Subject: RE: Yet another ftp site: ftp://ftp.chatnfiles.com
Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 16:12:15 -0400
From: "Oliver Maruhn" <oliver at maruhn.com>
To: "Tom Miller" <tlgalenson at yahoo.com>

 Hi Tom, 

> Thank you for the reply.  I have a suspicion that one of the 
> issues you will have to address are longer file paths.  It 
> seems to me Unix/Linux etc has a much shorter file-path 
> length limit than Windows.  

FileWatcher has its own Datababase which supports Filenames/Path up to a
length of 255 characters.  I guess there is some string buffer overflow
in our current scanner which prevents scanning your site correctly.

> I know the webmaster specifically 
> took advantage of the long-path-names to help identify the 
> downloads.  And he does use/allow blanks in the file paths.... 

That is good practise and fully supported by FileWatcher.
 
> Oh, yes, what language is the scanner written in?  

The current scanner is written in C.  That was necessary because we scan
many ftp sites simultaniously and therefore needed a program which had a
small memory/load footprint.  The current scanner is very fast an needs
very few resources.  But the problem is that C is not very good in
string handling and that it is next to impossible to debug the code for
buffer overflows.

Today servers have much more power so we decided to rewrite our scanner
in PERL.  The new scanner will need much more CPU time and RAM since
PERL is a pseudo-interpreted language.  On the other side PERL offers
very good string manipulations and buffer overflows are unknown to this
language.

> Maybe I  can find some free help to do your coding....  :) 

Thanks for you offer.  If one really wants to help rewriting the scanner
from scratch he must have very good knowledge about PERL, unix sockets,
and of course the ftp protocol.  Also he should understand some C to
read the source of the current scanner.




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