BITFTP

[Denis Beauchemin]

I asked for some Gnu software via BITFTP at PUCC.  All the files were
compressed tar files (.tar.Z).  After downloading them to my Sun from our
beloved IBM :-(, I couldn't uncompress them.

I tried both ASCII and BINARY Kermit modes and the results were the same:
"Not a compressed file" (or something like that).  I compared the sizes of
the files I had with the ones I got from prep.ai.mit.edu and mine were
always bigger.  Any ideas what went wrong?

I have a friend who can transfer files to his VAX via RSCS and then by
Ethernet to his Sun and he didn't have better results...

I don't have any problems with source files (such as shar files).  I even
FTPed Gnu-compress but it couldn't uncompress the other files either.  Is
there a place where files are uuencoded?  I'm pretty sure they would work
fine...

[[Ed's Note: Just off the top of my head, I'd bet you are running into
a problem with conversion from ASCII->EBCDIC (PUCC & Your IBM)->ASCII.
The conversions 'usually' work (ie: on character data, they do pretty
well), but if you are transferring things that look like binary data
(binaries, compressed files, etc) then the translation tends to do bad
things to your data. -bdg]]