Hi Brian and digest users!

You wrote:

 > Well you are over my head on that stuff.
 
I had written:

>     The FB list digests archive for February 2006 is up on:
> 
>   ftp://topo.math.u-psud.fr/pub/lcs/fb/FBdigests2006/
> 
> My ftp site is probably accessible only when your browser is
> configured to use an ftp proxy provided by your ISP.

Paraphrase: The difficulties you encountered should be
readily overcome by selecting your ISP (= Internet Service
Provider) to be the guy to fetch the ftp postings --- rather
than you or your ftp program/browser.

To accomplish this on my Mac I configure my browsers
(Netscape and Opera) to use the ftp proxy provided by my ISP
to each and every customer (like me).

Here is how I configured my two browsers:

Netscape: Preferences>Advanced>Proxies>Manual>
    FTP Proxy: proxy.free.fr
    Port: 3128

Opera: Preferences>Network>"Proxy Servers">
    FTP Proxy: proxy.free.fr
    Port: 3128

The data "FTP Proxy: proxy.free.fr" and "Port: 3128" that I
supplied were sent to me by my ISP "free.fr" on the day I was
accepted as a customer.  They work only for my ISP's
customers but for all of them so no secrecy is needed here.
They work because the ISP wants more happy customers and 
they have the necessary expertise in ftp access.

 Brian> If you have a help document for people why not
 >  post it on your web page with a link to it in
 > the monthly announcement?

Reasonable proposition.  But it requires updating my list of
successful access recipes for various browsers and
environments. PLEASE POST SUCCESSFUL RECIPES (or at least
backchannel them to me).  Has anyone have a recipe that works
under OSX Tiger without using an ISP proxy?

Cheers

Larry S.


PS. If you don't have a commercial ISP offering a proxy, you
probably have an institutional network at work with some
flavor of unix. In this case, use the spartan browser  "lynx"
on the command line with the syntax

   lynx  ftp://topo.math.u-psud.fr/pub/lcs/fb/FBdigests2006/

and "print" downloaded files to disk file.