[kolev]

To help with the wireless delivery to media card of our dictionaries, phrasebooks and other large data files we developed a simple FTP client for BlackBerry, which we called BeFTP.

We plan to release it free of charge for individual, non-profit use.

In fact, a pre-release version of it is already available at Welcome to BEIKS mobile! for direct wireless download.

What we need help with is finding out in which cases it does not work, i.e. how does it behave on GPRS vs CDMA devices, BES versus BIS versus plain phone mode use etc.

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

The current version is confrimed to work on T-Mobile GSM devices without BES as well as CDMA devices, again without BES.

[dietcoke]

friggin awesome!

an ftp client on my blackberry where i can download directly to media card is an awesome option!

downloading now.

[kolev]

BeFTP is apparently still rough, but in exchange it's free for non-commercial use.

That's when it works, of course, and we want to cover some essential basic functionality before we move away from it and start supporting it only for commercial licenses, if any at all.

All in all we would not have developed it if the BlackBerry browser was able to download files to the media card, something that it will sooner or later start doing.

The thing we're focused on now is making sure we can cover the needs of all connected devices , whether through enterprise server or through APN proxy...

[blakeatl]

Gonna try it out.

[rivviepop]

Hi, target audience here! *waves*

Any chance you will be incorporating S/FTP (over SSH2) into the BeFTP application? FTP is great (thanks!!) but many of us have a need for S/FTP as well, as time goes on less people are using traditional FTP in favour of a secured FTP (either S/FTP [ssh] or S-FTP [ssl]).

Just a random request from the peanut gallery. ;)

[Triforce66]

Originally Posted by rivviepop

Hi, target audience here! *waves*

Any chance you will be incorporating S/FTP (over SSH2) into the BeFTP application? FTP is great (thanks!!) but many of us have a need for S/FTP as well, as time goes on less people are using traditional FTP in favour of a secured FTP (either S/FTP [ssh] or S-FTP [ssl]).

Just a random request from the peanut gallery. ;)

*Stands behinds Rivviepop* I second that request! SSH2/SFTP would be great!!!

[rivviepop]

Originally Posted by Triforce66

*Stands behinds Rivviepop* I second that request! SSH2/SFTP would be great!!!

Grass roots movement!

@kolev: in the effort of trying to help, I know MidpSSH (and others) use the BouncyCastle J2ME API set for SSH support:

The Legion of the Bouncy Castle Java Cryptography APIs

[Redflea]

Give 'em a (free) inch, and they'll ask for a mile. ;)

[dietcoke]

Wirelessly posted (8320: BlackBerry8320/4.2.2 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100)

Can you implement option to choose bes,bis or tcp

We have many ports blocked on firewall with bes

[kolev]

We developed FTP because we needed a way to download files to the media card.

The only motivation to develop secure FTP would be financial.

If BeFTP secures enough donations (it will start asking for donations) or enough enterprise licenses OR if someone big enough offers a chunk of money for a secure FTP client then perhaps we will do it.

Until then, we're trying to make BeFTP work well in all real life situations.

I particularily want to hear from people using MDS, BES and BIS , people on CDMA, GPRS and iDEN networks.

So if you are kind enough, would you please open your way to BeSFTP by posting your BeFTP success status, carrier [technology] and enviornment (BES/BIS,MDS)...

[kolev]

> Can you implement option to choose bes,bis or tcp
> We have many ports blocked on firewall with bes

That's exactly what we are trying to do.

However, because of the split pipe security policy, we need a way to make that choice work automatically for most cases.

Exceptions will be facing the need to uninstall, reboot, install and manually change the setting before attempting a new connection.

[gameboy213]

I set it up on my 8830 and it seems to run fine. Sprint EVDO service.
I did try to download a 6mb jpg to store on my sd card..... when it was half way, right around 3mb, the device reset itself and I have half of the image on my sd card.

[gameboy213]

Is there a way to not have it default to the beiks.com server every time you open it? I have to enter the server info every time I go to use it.
Would also be great to have more than one server saved.... perhaps a few and beiks could be one of them.

[kolev]

Yeah, over time we'll add configuration persistency as well as some other obvious features.

Remember, it's free and, once we get it to serve its primary goal (from our standpoint) its further development will be a function of donations and commercial licenses.

As things are, it is only out there as a byproduct of our dictionary and Bible developments...

We may make persistency only available for registered users, for example.

Still haven't decided on that, we first want to make it reliable across the board and then figure how much interest is out there so that we can decide how much resources we can allocate to it.

In its current form it is mostly a byproduct of our dictionary and Bible development efforts...

[christopher]

Does not work for me (I'm using BES + BIS + TCP on a 8320).

This is really a product I'm looking for and believe that having the possibility to select the connection mode like it is the case in Viigo would be a great feature!

[Jaime]

Is it BIS-B compatible?

Best,
Jaime

[kolev]

Originally Posted by Jaime

Is it BIS-B compatible?

What is BIS-B?

Watch out, I will shortly be posting about an updated version allowing connection selection of BES+MDS, BES+BIS and direct TCP.

[rivviepop]

Originally Posted by kolev

What is BIS-B?

BIS-B is the actual technical name of the Internet data portion of a BIS setup, in your posts you are saying 'BIS' but you really mean BIS-B. Some providers do not have BIS-B capability as part of their BlackBerry/BIS service, it's email only - no data. In the case of your FTP client you should properly be using the term BIS-B since it's a data-only application.

[rivviepop]

Working:

service: T-Mobile BIS-B, T-Mobile Wifi (both)
host: proftpd 1.2.10 running on linux
login: usernames + passwords

Not working: anonymous logins on the same server which does accept anon logins. "Could not connect to FTP server" is the dialog error in the client. The server log has nothing more than:

"USER anonymous" 331
"PASS anonymous" 230
"QUIT" 221

On a user based login that is working, the third line item above is a normal "PWD" 257 -' command, so something is failing that I cannot see (bad client command?).

Suggestion: the password default should be 'anonymous@' - many FTP servers require an @ sign in the password field for successful anon logins.

[kolev]

Thanks for the feedback.

There is likely a great deal of servers on which BeFTP will actually fail to login and/or communicate properly...developers tell me there are at least 20 flavors of the FTP exchange standard and far not all of them are currently covered.

We may eventually get there.

At the time being, you can try and see if changing the password to anonymous@ would make any difference. I would actually expect not, but I am short ot suggesting what the problem could be other than the above mentioned protocol dialects.

What is more interesting is that the socket connection is apparently working on GPS/BIS.

I take it this does not include BES, right?

If so is Christopher the only one here on BES/BIS that has problems connecting?

And, for those of you who may have better understanding, are BES and BIS two alternative methods of achieving TCP connectivity?