Subject: tar on the fly

From: [email-masked] (Muljadi Sulistio)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 16:45:36 -0800

Is there any documentation on how to setup tar on the fly?  I'm interested in
setting up a ftp server that will create tar on the fly for download.  Is there
any drawbacks on using this feature, security or resources ?
Thanks.

-- 
Muljadi Sulistio
[email-masked]
Silicon Graphics, Inc.

---

From: Bill Campbell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 10:08:43 -0800

>any drawbacks on using this feature, security or resources ?

This only requires setting up the appropriate entries in your
ftpconversions file, and putting the support programs in the ~ftp/bin
directory.  I'm attaching a sample ftpconversions file which allows
automatic .tar, .tar.Z, and .tar.gz requests to send straight tar,
compressed tar, and gzip'ed tar files respectively.

Like all things allowing this is a trade-off.  We recommend that people
getting our mailing list archives from our ftp site use the tar.gz options
for multiple files or .gz for single files as we keep the archives in
uncompressed Berkeley mailbox format so that we can index them and retrieve
on the indexes.

The CPU time for compression and/or tar is probably offset by the decreased
bandwidth consumed in the transfer.

Bill
--
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