Problems FTP'ing to VAX???

[djmnyc]

Hello.

I was wondering if anyone else has experienced problems FTP'ing generated reports to a VAX box?

I am using Crystal Enterprise 9.0, running on a Win2k box, and I am getting the following error:

destination directory error. CrystalEnterprise.Ftp: 550 %RMS-F-SYN, file specification syntax error

I have searched everywhere for help resolving this problem, and so far ... no dice.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
djm

 

[fredp1]

It's been a very, very long time since i've managed a Vax, but the security on accessing the directories tends to be strict.
Can you post the url you are using?

If I remember correctly, it should be something like
Nodename"Username password"::disk$1:[temp]filename.txt

I might be off with some of the syntax but give it a go.
If that works, you can setup a ACL in the directory to avoid passing the username and password in the url.

Good luck
Fred

 

[djmnyc]

Thanks a lot Fred. I appreciate the reply.

You have more experience than I do, since I've never worked with a VAX box ... well maybe to answer e-mail and user IRC back in the day, but that's about it.

We do have a few people that I found here internaly that have VAX experience working on it now, so hopefully they'll come up with something. I am going to forward to them your reply also. The VAX people here monitored the FTP session log files and told me that Crystal was appended a forward slash to the directory location, and that this is what was causing the invalid file format specification error. Crystal minimally appends a forward slash no matter what you put in the destination directory input box. There currently is no way getting around this using Crystal. The VAX people are looking on the VAX side now, to try and preprocess the FTP data (directory info), before actually handling the FTP process.

I also spoke to tech support at Crystal yesterday. Not much help. They told me that they never tested the FTP functionality on VAX, and that they wouldn't be able to do anything to resolve the issue until the next release.

Dan

 

[fredp1]

Just a thought Dan...
If you cannot suppress the slash(have you tried encoling the url in quotes?), then maybe you get Crystal to send it to a local disk, then schedule another ftp program thats VAX friendly that does the final FTP, or get the VAX to pick up the file (via a DCL script).
The last time I used a vax was back in Ver 5 days with Pathworks for PC networking. I remember there was a command that allowed FTP between the VAX and a PC network.

Goodluck

 

[djmnyc]

Hey Fred. Just wanted to let you know that we resolved the problem. Thanks very much for your help.

The problem was resolved on the VAX side. A collegue was able to setup some preprocessing logic, that allowed the VAX FTP session to recognize the directory/filename format that Crystal was sending over.

Thank god ... the workaround of FTP'ing to a different UNIX box, and kicking off a cronjob to then FTP over from UNIX to VAX was going to be ugly. lol

Dan

 

[fredp1]

Good to hear.
Cheers