We prepared a central facility to share data among all partners. It uses both HTTP and FTP protocols to allow an easy upload/download of data with a pre-built hierarchical structure, in order to maintain simplified access policies. It is reasonable using this facility just to share large amounts of data when needed, instead of using another web oriented framework.

• Host: res.ba.issia.cnr.it
• Username and password: one per research unit

Note that the ftp site is case sensitive. So FILE and File refer different files or folders.

All users share the same root folder, where a set of per-user sub-folders is available. Each of them belongs to one of the authorized users and can be used to upload files by them. Each user can upload files to his/her own folder only.

All per-user folders present the same organization:

• public (browseable by all)
• private (only browseable by the owner, see below)
• public_html (browseable by web, too)

In the common root folder a 000-ALL sub-folder is also visible, and contains data usable by all users (e.g. bounding boxes for all project sites). This folder is owned by cnr-issia user.

You can access in read-only mode the ftp archive by using any browser. With common browsers, you usually just need to use the following URI:

ftp://username@res.ba.issia.cnr.it/

and the browser will ask for your password. It is generally better using a regular client to upload/download files. We suggest to use any of the following free programs:

• Filezilla
• FireFTP plugin for Firefox

Note that if you are behind a firewall you have to use a passive connection, which is generally autoselected by common clients. Non text files have to be trasferred in binary mode. This is also correctly negotiated by common clients, so we advice against using basic FTP programs sometimes provided by some operating systems, such as most Windows versions: install and use an advanced client instead.

Each user has a private folder within his/her main folder. That folder cannot be browsed by other users, but its contents can be downloaded if one knows exactly the filenames to access. So, if you would share a subfolder 'Abc' with another user you have only to tell the other user to open the 'Abc' subfolder in your own private area. How that can be done could depend on the specific client used: for instance, in Filezilla you have to write the right path of the hidden sub-folder (e.g. /cnr-issia/private/Abc) in the 'Remote Sites' field, and then press the <Enter> key; after that, you will see the available files under the 'Abc' folder.

Users can also share data (or documents) to be accessed by web (in read-only mode). That can be done by uploading data in the public_html folder. That folder corresponds to the following URI:

http://res.ba.issia.cnr.it/biosos/user/

In order to preserve user's privacy an empty index.html is pre-loaded in the public_html folder: it prevents automatic file indexing. Note that the contents of that folder is world-wide visible and readable without a password.

File_Transfer_Protocol