Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a Easy FTP with OS X
I just discovered a wildly handy thing by accident.
If you want to connect to an ftp server, you can use an application like Transmit or just connect from the command line, which is what I’ve been doing for years.
Connecting to my other computer just now, it dawned on me that there’s an even easier way:
- In the Finder, pull down the Go menu and select Connect to Server (or just hit Command+K)
- If you are connecting anonymously, simply enter the address of the server. If you need to log in, prepend the address with your username as you would at the command line or when using a browser, eg. username@ftp.myserver.com
- You will then be prompted to provide your password, if required
- In a few moments, the remote server will show up on your desktop, just like a local drive or your iDisk
Brilliant! This is probably a well-known, oft-discussed feature - it’s certainly an obvious one, given the clue in the name Connect to Server - but it was new to me, so I thought I’d post it just in case, for the benefit of future Googlers.
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It’s slightly less discussed than you might think, mostly because it’s unfortunately buggy and a little bit broken. I wouldn’t rely on it 100%…
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Yep, it does seem to be a bit skew-whiff - as usual with OS X, it’s a permissions thing.
Back to trusty Transmit…
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Fugu is a nice little SFTP program that’s well worth checking out.
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Thanks for the tip Matt - not heard of that before, and it is indeed nice…
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Hmmm. It works, but it mounts
the remote directory read-only. Even
if the user/pass I supplied should have
write access.This makes it only half work.
Am I missing something?
—jb
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Uh, who are you joblow?
Can’t fix that unless I know which user you are. If you aren’t a user, you shouldn’t be able to do anything but read.
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I am trying to figure out how to do this but put in a Username Password combo ahead of time. I can’t seem to and it keeps putting me in the anonymous area.
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Sorry Joshua - my brain thought your comment was on a different post here!
I’m not sure if you can put in a user/pass ahead of time…
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As far as I have been able to determine, this grants only read-only access even when a username that should have read-write is supplied. Furthermore, permissions on the FTP side do not work as you would expect (from using a dedicated FTP program). The permissions that apply to you, when using OS/X FTP in this way (vs. a dedicated program) are those which are granted to “others,” not “self” or “group.” (i.e. the —- —- XXX) bits.
Thus I have found that while this OS/X feature is tantalizingly close to perfect, I’m back to using the FTP program from a (yuck!) Terminal shell.
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