What is Rumpus?

Welcome to Rumpus, the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server for Mac OS that brings workstation levels of reliability and performance to your Macintosh. Rumpus is unique among FTP servers for the Mac OS in two distinct ways. First, Rumpus is Open Transport-native (but also supports MacTCP). This means you can serve files much faster than with other FTP servers because they rely on MacTCP for networking functions, which is much slower and less sophisticated than Open Transport. Second, the most popular FTP servers for the Mac today use File Sharing to determine what folders and volumes are made available to the user when they log in to the server. Rumpus, on the other hand, operates more like popular HTTP (Web) servers, allowing you to select a folder or volume from which everything is served. This has several benefits:

• File Sharing (or AppleShare) does not need to be enabled unless you require username/password authentication on a folder by folder basis.

• Up to 32 users can connect to the server simultaneously, not just 10. Rumpus Pro supports a maximum of 256 simultaneous connections.

• An unlimited number of separate folders can be accessed via FTP, not just 10.

• You can share volumes or folders via AppleTalk without having them available via FTP.

• Performance is improved by avoiding File Sharing overhead.

The one major drawback to this approach is that when you share a folder or volume on your Macintosh, it is not automatically shared to FTP users. This is easy to work around, however, as Rumpus fully supports Mac OS aliases. Simply put an alias to each folder or volume that your FTP users need access to into your default FTP folder. When a user logs on to your Rumpus FTP server, any volume or folder aliased will appear to be just another directory on the server.

Also note that while Rumpus does not log users into File Sharing as other FTP servers do, it can use your Mac's Users & Groups settings to provide username and password security. For details, see the Security Options section later in this guide, as well as your Mac OS documentation on File Sharing and Users & Groups.

About FTP Servers

FTP servers come in many flavors and their capabilities differ depending on how they are configured. To the end user, there is very little that distinguishes one FTP server from another, except perhaps the speed with which a file is served. To the server administrator, however, there are many considerations to be taken into account, including creating logical directory structures, managing anonymous and registered (or authenticated) user accounts, maintaining log files, tracking usage, and security issues. Another area of concern is how files are encoded, which presents a unique challenge to some Mac users. Files are traditionally served as ASCII text or as binary data by most FTP servers, but many Mac FTP servers are capable of serving files in MacBinary mode as well. This enables a Macintosh file, such as an application or a QuickTime movie, to be transmitted with its data fork, resource fork and Finder information intact.

Another concern is what to do with files that are sent by a client to the server in encoded formats, such as MacBinary, or BinHex. Part of the task of administering an FTP server is being aware of the major encoding issues and providing content on your server in the appropriate format. Rumpus takes care of virtually all these concerns for you by providing more than one way to serve files and to automatically encode files if requested by an FTP client.

FTP servers are capable of many tasks, but for the most part your users will be using just a few of these services, such as:

• Downloading files

• Uploading files

• Deleting files

• Creating and deleting directories

Most FTP clients these days use a graphical user interface (GUI), and will therefore be able to point and click the mouse to execute these commands. Other FTP users, however, still might be using a command-line interface to execute these commands. For the most part, FTP servers such as Rumpus do not care what type of client is being used to access files on your server.

Finally, a word should be said here about how FTP clients and servers communicate and how this protocol differs from other popular client-server protocols on the Internet. On the Web, which uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), each transaction between a Web browser and server is a separate occurrence because HTTP is a stateless protocol. This means that the client and server only communicate for the brief period of time during the request from a client and the server's response. After the transaction has been completed, the client and server no longer communicate, even though the user may still be reading (or otherwise working with) the file that was sent.

FTP, on the other hand, uses a stateful form of communication. This means that the client and server can use a single connection to issue and process multiple successive requests. This type of communication enables more efficient file transfers and makes performing multiple transactions easier. The down side to this type of communication, however, is that the server has to work a little harder to maintain communication with its clients. FTP servers that serve files to anonymous users often have to handle greater numbers of simultaneous connections (and for longer periods of time), so the ability to place limits on anonymous access is an important feature of Rumpus that is described in detail later in this document.