After a frustrating week with a new ISP, I've got a list of "gotchas" you can look for if you have FTP troubles with GT-View

Had some chats with the owner/developer here, and learned some of the inner workings of the FTP module in GT-View. It's a simple FTP client, and does not give lots of feedback if there is much of a problem.

I'll briefly go over the commands it uses, which are the same as DOS FTP, which I had to use to discover what weird mapping and alias my ISP was doing to my account
( my new isp's page http://www.naturalstudies.org/~solar/Mi ... stall.html )
Looks like an ordinary path, but it's actually pretty strange how FTP gets there.

CONNECT naturalstudies.org ( Your ISP.COM )
DNS lookup works pretty well

USER your.user_name ( some sites forgot you are at naturalstudies.org, and you
have to add it too : your.user_name@naturalstudies.org )

PASSWORD whatever your password is, echoed with ******** Sometimes you can get fancy on the command line, and enter both thusly: your.user_name ******** (username SPACE password) at the user prompt

now here is where I entered PWD (print working directory) to see where I was, my ISP is QUITE confused as to what a directory is, they list it 2 places on the manual pages, and in an email from the help desk, they gave me a 3rd option. My fancy FTP client was no help, it was always able to find and navagiate the directorys, and what it showed, would not work for me.
My ISP's manual pages offered:
/home/solar/
/home/solar/public_html/ and strangely:
/home//public_html/images/ with 2 // in there.
email helpdesk was even more obtuse:
> please try this path and let me
> know if you have problem.
/var/www/html/users/solar/images/ Nope, no joy there.

Diggin thru it with DOS - FTP, I finally discovered that
/home/solar/public_html/images , with NO Trailing / was the key, and now, whenever the wireless is working, things are uploading properly.

Share and Enjoy
Mike

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Subject: Re: GT-View & FTP functions Quote message:
As for debugging.

All GT-View is use standard FTP commands

It logs in,

Set the mode to binary

Issues a changedir command

does a put command

All of the above can be done in a windows "command" shell to debug

For example Start->Run->Command ( command shell will come up )

FTP ftp.myisp.com
should prompt for user -- put in userid
should prompt for password - put in password

Once logged in, you can

pwd, for print working directory
dir, will list files and folders
cd, is change dir, so try and cd to the public place you pictures are. Once there you can do a pwd and see where it is.

Every ISP is different in both folder names, and how they get mapped for public access.
Also - beware "\" not "/" , unix/linux is reverse from windows paths delimiters

After working for a week, now I'm getting this, and nothing has changed.
ARGHH !!

log:
Sending file failed
Attempting to connect
Resolving hostname naturalstudies.org.
Connecting to 209.216.203.134.
Connected.
Connection established
Sending Changedir command
Set mode to binary
Sending upload command
Starting FTP transfer
Transfer complete
Disconnecting.
Disconnected.
Sending file failed

More troubleshooting in store for me.


UPDATE 10/3/2006:
Loggd off, and back on, and it's working. I'm baffled, but glad it's working again.

UPDATE 10/5/2006:
Appears my ISP has assumed I have a 'bot, because GT-View keeps trying to access my webhost, and has cut my DSL, without telling me why my service is down. No internet concetivity at all. DSL Modem and wireless router appear happy, and I have reset and rebooted everything several times.

UPDATE 10/16/2006
After being idle for several days, the DSL ISP (Yahoo/SBC/ATT) appears to have relented, and I'm running again, at 30 min intervals. After a week or two, I may try to step the rate up. Tech support is clueless, "we show no outages in your area"

Newer Update

I have a linksys router, and when using a linksys wireless USB adapter, things are now working fine. I have 1% signal, so it's always loosing connection and re-aquireing, but I'm getting realtime updates.

Airlink, D-link, and no-name clones, all get better signals (50%), but apparently don't support some critical part of low-level FTP protocols, so they fail for the GT-View FTP, but a regular FTP program works fine. Drove me nuts for months, and I swore at the program writer too much. And it was not his fault. The 802.11 protocol is supposed to be interchangeable from vendor to vendor, but I've found it's not.

Also finding that using a AC powered USB hub, while supposedly transparent, screws up the USB adapter and it contributes to a failing link., any hub causes the link to fail.

Not sure I understand ...

What is the wireless for ? the computer logging data and starting the FTP to the dsl router located some where else?

wireless is still the wildest of computers. I have totally given up on it. wireless Phones, neighbors routers ect make for it to be sub-par performace at best.

I have run cat5 for all my systems, everything is hardwired ... sure it took a couple of days, it works 100%, flawlessly, but just look at all the time one spends makeing wirelss work!

GT-View has been running on my systems for almost 3 years now. I use Godaddy for the ISP, I have had both DSL and Cable for the home side, never once ran into issues you have had

I have my laptop in the garage, wired RS232 to the inverter. I have wireless to the household Linksys router, (has 5 PC's using it, capable of 255PC's) to give my PC internet access, so it can upload data to a webpage (sun's down now, so it's just doing updates of a 0 watt inverter)

Using the linksys - linksys, I'm getting 1% signal, but an update makes it thru about every 10 min or so anyway.
Using another brand of wireless at the laptop, gives better signal, reliable HTTP links, but no GT-View data makes it thru. I'm likely going to hack into the USB wireless dongle, and put a better antenna into it.

EDIT: At wireless router, switching SSID broadcast:ON improved reliability 200% - wireless clients don't always do as instructed, if they don't see the host SSID.

OK,

Run a wire Mike, all your ( and mine ) problems will be over. What ever you think will take in efforts in running the cat5 will be less than the continual battle your fighting on the wireless stuff

I am running Beta version 1.9.2 of GT-view, and it works nicely for most of the day. But I find that I need to close and restart the program about twice a day because it hangs during FTP transfers. It does not ever time out, but seems to wait for the other side, and if there is an error it never closes the link to try again.

Could you add an automatic timeout, based on the write to ftp interval? Perhaps three times the write interval? If a transfer has not completed within 3 passes of the interval timer, something is wrong and the ftp should be aborted and retried.

This would keep me from having to log onto the PC five times a day to see if the transfers are still working. (It's hung up right now and I am not there to reset it..)

Thats a good suggestion .. I'll see what I can do

In the interm, try using a host like godaddy, I have run for years with ever "hanging", there are error's every now and then but GT-View doesn't hang and does re-try

Mike90045 had all sorts of issues, he now uses godaddy and no problems since

Amen ! I just created a new domain, and signed up for the free hosting plan, and put up with the solar/AE banner ads, which if you use Firefox & NoScript, you don't see at all! I do get an occasional FTP error, but it always seems to reset itself at the next upload

My DSL line is serviced from several towns away, and I get a fairly large number of DSL line errors per day. But most applications seem to work well for me. I do my hosting through GoDaddy, who hosts my website.

GT-view hung up on me yesterday afternoon. The file is 0 bytes, and the FTP program is still trying to write a day later.

http://solar.johnjan.com/screen/index.htm

The two screens have not yet given up trying to load the jpg to my godaddy account, after 24 hours.

Any ideas?