glANCE v0.40 - The siteop's friendly helper   by Independent (IND)

# README.TXT - glANCE readme file ______________________________________________________________________________ Introduction Welcome to glANCE v0.39 - the siteop's friendly helper glANCE was written to help siteops and groupops to administrate their site with respect to an easy-to-use interface. Although the name 'glANCE' is derived from the famous glFTPD written by greyline and continued by usurper, it doesn't mean that it won't support any other daemons. glANCE has a pretty open API, so one could write a DLL for his ftpdaemon to fully support it's commands. Right now, as this all is still a very early beta version, I just included support for glFTPD v1.16.x (and maybe below) and v1.17.x/v1.18.x/v1.19.x, DLLs for ftp4all 2.x and 3.x may follow. This version is meant to help me to change glANCE to the needs of the users. Once this is done, modules for these other ftp daemons will follow. So you are encouraged to write me about whatever you would like to see in glANCE (unless it's an mp3 player or the like :) ______________________________________________________________________________ The basics After starting glANCE, wou will be prompted with the site-manager dialog where you can ADD, EDIT and DELETE the sites you want to manage with it. Since EDIT and DELETE would be fairly self-explaining, I'll just explain the unusual things in the ADD dialog. + Site name A simple nickname for this site, once chosen you can't change it. + Daemon type Select your daemon from the list of DLLs (currently just glftpd) so glANCE can support the site at it's best: - glance_v1.16.x is for v1.16.x (and probably below) - glance_v1.17.x is for v1.17.x, v1.18.x and v1.19.x (no change on the client side, so the DLL remains the same) All the main userinterface and commands are contained within this DLL, so glANCE will look fairly different upon changing this setting. + Clipboard contents After you added a user with glANCE, the clipboard will contain whatever you set here. There are tokens for things like the site's IP which get replaced before setting the clipboard. Telling a new user the site's IP and channel should get pretty easy with this setting. + Quick buttons You can define up to 4 quick-access buttons (the ones at the top of the main window). The label is the name shown on the button, and the command is the string sent to the server (with a preceding SITE, so it's for SITE commands only). After you added your sites, you simply select the one you want to connect to, and glANCE will be ready to work with. You can customize the look and behaviour of glANCE with help of the OPTIONS menu, where you can set the following up to now: + Use passive transfers If you are firewalled and you usually can't get the ftp-daemon to connect to your host, enable this option. + Auto-Resize window Whenever you select an action from the left window, like the Add-User dialog, the size of the window-splitting delimiter can change itself to the size of this dialog. If you got plenty of space on your screen, this might come in handy. In cases where you run at low resolutions (800x600 should be the absolute limit), you might get a far too small log-window, and would like to keep the window-splitter at a fixed position. + Show browser gridlines Toggles the gridlines in the browser window. + Display binary notification If enabled, it will ask you before downloading a file which has no known ASCII extension. So if you download a file with the filesystem browser, a requester will come up if glANCE thinks it's binary, giving you the chance to cancel it. + Select log window font (you really should know what this does) ______________________________________________________________________________ The un-obvious things + You can rename a directory or file in the browser itself, you just need to click the name twice with a short pause between, as you always do when you rename something in explorer or the like. + If an action-dialog requires things like a list of users or groups, it will fetch those as soon as they get displayed. This is done once for the first time only. If you add/delete users/groups after that, this list will update itself without getting a new list from the server. This should speedup operation, but has a severe problem: glFTPD likes to give you response codes which mean that an operation was ok (the 2xx numbers for example), even if it was not okay. So glANCE needs to guess if you could for example delete a user, or if that operation failed, in order to update the internal userlist properly. There are cases where this doesn't work, especially with different versions of glFTPD, and so these lists would get out of sync at some point. If this happens, you need to logout and login right now. + If your ftp-site uses heavily-modified output masks (like the mask for SITE WHO or anything), glANCE will have troubles parsing the response from such commands. When you notice these things, you should mail me the output-mask and I'll see if I can adopt the parsing to support it as well. glANCE doesn't rely on many things, but there are some keywords involved it searches for. + Once you entered a number or string in any dialog field this setting will remain unchanged if you switch between dialogs. It will not be saved between sessions. + In the AddUser dialog, there is a '(gl default)' entry for the group and private group. This just means glANCE will not try to add the user to any group, instead the daemon will choose a group for the new user. So if you are a groupop, the user will most likely reside in the same group as you are after adding, since glFTPD will add him to your group as default. If you would select a group here, the user would then be in 2 groups - your group and the one you specified. If you press the ADD button, the user will just get added. By choosing the ADD + EDIT button, the EditUser dialog will pop up after successfully adding the user, so you can edit things like his flags and so on with a single mouseclick. + In both the AddUser and EditUser dialogs, when you enter an IP, glANCE will check it's format before really adding it. To see how this format-check works, simply type something in the editbox for the 'Parse singleline parameters / IP list' and hit the PARSE button to the right. All the IP's will get parsed into the 10 IP boxes, and you can check how they look then. Speaking about these PARSE buttons: the first one is for a list of IPs, all of which are separated by at least one space. When you hit the PARSE button, all the 10 IPs will get erased and replaced with the ones you entered here. The second PARSE button takes a single line with the username and password in front of the IP list. It will additionally fill in the user and pass fields upon you press the PARSE button. An example line is: 'foo buzz 123.234.345 [email protected]' which would add user foo with password buzz, and 2 IPs: *@123.234.345.* [email protected].*.* New versions will not touch the IP part if it contains a DNS like *.my.net instead of a dotted-style IP. + The filesystem-browser allows easy retrieval of files from the site, and nuke/unnuke of releases. After pressing the right mousebutton above the browser, you'll get a small context menu with those functions. If you retrieve a file with either double-click or this menu, glANCE will download it into your system temp-dir, and execute the associated application (e.g. if you downloaded an *.nfo file, your textviewer will pop up, and for a *.zip file WinZIP or anything). The browser will also cache the dirlistings to allow fast navigation. In case you need to refresh a directory, simply press F2. After you exit from the site, those temporary files will get wiped. + glftpd v1.17.x/v1.18.x only: If you change the number of leech_slots a user may have, you NEED to set the number of group_slots as well (to the left of it). Failing todo so will cause the number of group_slots to be set to the same value of leech_slots. This is because there is no way to determine the actual number of slots the user has, and one can only set a new leech- slot-limit by setting the group-slot-limit as well. ______________________________________________________________________________ Known bugs + glANCE might think a command worked on the ftp daemon (e.g. ADDUSER), but instead the daemon denied the request. Unfortunately glFTPD always sends the same ftp-code (2xx) even if the command failed, so it's about parsing the plaintext which can change from version to version. Someone really should fix this problem on glFTPD. + glANCE might have problems parsing responses for things like SITE WHO if your daemon uses heavily modified output masks. Not sure how to overcome this yet. + in general, if your site uses output masks which differ really much from the standard glftpd masks (e.g. certain stop-words renamed or missing), it's not uncommon that glANCE can't parse them anymore and can even quit with a GPF. ______________________________________________________________________________ Contact information This software is still beta, so if it formats your HD, kills the neighbours cat or manages to destroy the moon - thats your problem then. Ofcourse nothing like that happened while beta testing, and it's considered to be pretty stable already. DLLs to support ftp4all will most likely NOT follow (it was planned on startup, but there is no real need for that. besides, ftp4all is so much different that it's hard for me as I never used it). Send comments and improvement ideas to [email protected] Ah yes, this software is, ofcourse, freeware (as if anyone would care in the scene) ;) ______________________________________________________________________________ URLs glFTPD homepage........... http://www.glftpd.org , http://www.glftpd.net (maintained by rassilon, archimedes) glANCE coder's homepage... http://boeh10.kfunigraz.ac.at/~psi/projects.html