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WS_FTP LE |
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January 17, 2004. There is no help or information of any kind about installing version 6 on a machine that already has version 5.
Version 6 continues a minor annoyance from version 5.08 as shown here. It generates a 550 error, "No such file or directory" after it has successfully transferred a file. This only happens on the first file transfer in a given FTP session. Version 5.08 did this all the time, version 6 only does it rarely. |
June 6, 2000. When a v4.6 user clicks on the button for the "Latest LE" rather than be informed of the latest version, it automatically starts to download. The user is not even allowed to pick the target directory. On an NT machine, it downloaded to C:\TEMP.
The file that is downloaded is WS_FTPLE.ZIP. When the download completed, I was put into a ZIP application which showed three compressed files. One of the files was whatsnew.txt which is the readme for WS_FTP.
The good news is there are instructions in this file for installing WS_FTP. The bad news is they are wrong. It said to doubleclick the downloaded file and follow the instructions. Maybe in the old days, the download was an EXE, but double-clicking a ZIP file just unpacks it. Also, there is no information on whether older versions of WS_FTP should be un-installed prior to installing the new 5.08 version.
The other two files in the ZIP archive were EXEs: ws_ftp16.exe and ws_ftple.exe. There is no explanation about what these files are. The whatsnew.txt file has a section for installing the program "from a disk" that says you should run ws_ftple.exe so that's what I did.
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During the installation, it asked this question, which I found confusing.
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Again, there was no explanation of this in the whatsnew.txt file. I chose not to overwrite the existing INI file which turned out to be the correct decision. After the program was installed, I looked up INI file in the Help. The only reference was in a section about installing the PRO version of WS_FTP, not the LE version, but its probably the same. It said:
Note: If you are upgrading from a previous version of WS_FTP Pro, do not replace the WS_FTP. ini file, as this file contains all your sites.
They could have mentioned this before starting the installation.
Before the upgrade, Help->About said I had version 4.60 98.03.17. After the upgrade it reported version 5.08 2000.02.23. The main EXE for the product is ws_ftp95.exe. Before the upgrade the properties of this file said that it was version 5,0,0,1. After the upgrade it said the product version was 6,0,5,1. Why isn't it 5.08??
When I start the new version, it identifies itself in the
message log as:
WS_FTP LE 5.08 2000.01.13, Copyright © 1992-2000 Ipswitch, Inc.
The date here does not match the date in the Help->About.
Version 5.08 causes an error the first time I transfer a file
from 
my computer to a remote FTP server. This happens on two web sites, one
running Unix, the other running Windows NT and never happened when I was using version
4.6. Below is an excerpt from the message
log.
The file is transferred as shown by the 226 message. I have no idea why WS_FTP is trying to execute the file name (index.htm) as a command.
I found no mention of existence of the LE version of WS_FTP on the vendors (www.ipswitch.com) web site. There is a link for it on their main download page, but no real explanation what it is.
| Page last updated: May 10, 2004 |
May
10, 2004. I opted to install version 6 into a new directory which worked
fine. You can import your list of FTP sites from v5 to v6 by simply
copying file WS_FTP.ini.