[OT] Space remaining on ISP's free webspace

[Rhino]

I realize that this isn't a particularly appropriate place to ask this but
I've already posted to my ISP's newsgroup and am still waiting for an answer
hours later. I thought I'd try here too and see if someone has any ideas.

I have 5 MB of free space on my ISPs server as part of my Internet service.
I am trying to figure out how much of that space is still available. (I'd
settle for knowing how much of the space is used; I can subtract that from
the 5 MB to see how much space is left.)

I'm using Ant to FTP a small directory tree to the server and it's coming
back with a very vague message that says it konked out on the fourth file
but without any specific reason. I don't know if the 5 MB is exhausted or a
file is corrupted or the connection was lost or something else altogether so
I want to determine the amount of free space left, just to rule out that
possible cause.

I'm inclined to think the space is _not_ exhausted - I deleted a bunch of
files before attempting to add the new ones and I think the old were bigger
(in aggregate) than the new ones - but I could be wrong.

I have an FTP client, SmartFTP, but I can't find any way to determine how
much space is left. It has a command line feature and I've tried doing 'df'
but it doesn't even recognize the command. Then again, the only command it
*has* recognized, of the ones that I've tried, is 'pwd'. 'ls', 'li', 'echo
hi', 'dir' have all been rejected as unknown commands. Mind you, I don't
know what operating system the server is using!

I've connected directly to the server with the ftp command from my Windows
command prompt but the ftp session doesn't appear to have any subcommands
that can determine the amount of space remaining.

I thought about writing a quickie Java class that could interrogate the
server for space remaining but didn't find any classes that would tell me
that. There is no FTP class and the URL class doesn't seem to have anything
to interrogate space remaining on the server.

I'm spinning my wheels here and would appreciate some suggestions. This
seems like something that should be easy to determine but nothing I've tried
yet works....

 

[Oliver Wong]

I realize that this isn't a particularly appropriate place to ask this but
I've already posted to my ISP's newsgroup and am still waiting for an
answer hours later. I thought I'd try here too and see if someone has any
ideas.

I have 5 MB of free space on my ISPs server as part of my Internet
service. I am trying to figure out how much of that space is still
available. (I'd settle for knowing how much of the space is used; I can
subtract that from the 5 MB to see how much space is left.)

I'm using Ant to FTP a small directory tree to the server and it's coming
back with a very vague message that says it konked out on the fourth file
but without any specific reason. I don't know if the 5 MB is exhausted or
a file is corrupted or the connection was lost or something else
altogether so I want to determine the amount of free space left, just to
rule out that possible cause.

I'm inclined to think the space is _not_ exhausted - I deleted a bunch of
files before attempting to add the new ones and I think the old were
bigger (in aggregate) than the new ones - but I could be wrong.

I have an FTP client, SmartFTP, but I can't find any way to determine how
much space is left. It has a command line feature and I've tried doing
'df' but it doesn't even recognize the command. Then again, the only
command it *has* recognized, of the ones that I've tried, is 'pwd'. 'ls',
'li', 'echo hi', 'dir' have all been rejected as unknown commands. Mind
you, I don't know what operating system the server is using!

I've connected directly to the server with the ftp command from my Windows
command prompt but the ftp session doesn't appear to have any subcommands
that can determine the amount of space remaining.

I thought about writing a quickie Java class that could interrogate the
server for space remaining but didn't find any classes that would tell me
that. There is no FTP class and the URL class doesn't seem to have
anything to interrogate space remaining on the server.

I'm spinning my wheels here and would appreciate some suggestions. This
seems like something that should be easy to determine but nothing I've
tried yet works....

The set of FTP commands is defined in RFC 959:

http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/959/20.htm

PWD and LIST list files, and some servers will return information like
free space along with that. This is not required by the standards, though.

SITE, SYST and STAT return information about the server. The standard
does define very specifically what information should be returned, so the
free space may be there, or it might not be.

If your server defines custom commands (which is perfectly legal), they
would probably be listed via the HELP command.

The ALLO command requests a certain amount of space be allocated to
prepare for a file upload. Implementations are free to treat this as a NOOP,
but perhaps your server will check the disk quota rules and return an error
if the allocation would exceed the quota. You can test this by trying to
allocate some large value (e.g. 10 megs) and seeing if it fails. If it does,
you might be able to use a binary search to determine the maximal file size
you can upload.

Otherwise, I recommend you simply download all the files you own
(presumably less than 5 megs), and measure their sizes.

- Oliver