Knowledgebase

Fetch is an easy-to-use, full-featured FTP client for the Apple Macintosh.

Logging In To Fetch

1. Once you open Fetch, you will see the New Connection window (see Figure 1).
2. Enter the Host Name. This is yourdomain.com. For example, if you had registered yourdomain.com, you would enter yourdomain.com.
3. Enter the User ID. This will be yourdomain@yourdomain.com.
4. Enter your Password. This is the same as your Site Manager password.
5. Press OK.
6. Once you are logged in, you will see the screen shown in Figure 3. You are initially taken to the root directory.

Accessing the Correct Directory

To access a directory, simply double-click on it. Your website needs to be uploaded to var/www/html.

1. Click on var.
2. Click on www.

3. Click on html. The result will show HTML in the pull-down menu. Notice that you can access the directories above by clicking on that pull-down menu.

   You can expand or collapse either portion of the FTP window by using the small gray arrows at the bottom of the window.

Getting Files

1. Click on the file(s) you want to download.

2. Click the Get File button.

   By default, these files are downloaded to the desktop. You can change the download directory in the Fetch Preferences. You can also drag and drop a file from the FTP window onto the desktop or into any Finder Window.

Putting Files

1. Click on the Put Files� button. The Choose a File window will open.
2. Select the desired files to be uploaded to the current directory.

Using the Fetch Menu Bar

• Fetch Menu: Access the Fetch Preferences.
• File Menu: Open new connections and access/create shortcuts once you are in an open FTP connection.
• Edit Menu: Cut, copy, and paste.
• Remote Menu: View/edit files and rename directories. You can also 'get' and 'put' files.
• Directories Menu: This lets you change directories and create new directories. You can also jump up a directory or two, just as with the pull-down menu discussed earlier.
• Customize Menu: Grants access to the Fetch Preferences. You can create/edit shortcuts here and do more advanced tasks like Stuffix mapping.
• Window Menu: Allows access to Fetch Help. You can also jump between open connections if you have multiple connections open.

Important FTP Server Disconnect Information

Properly disconnecting from your FTP server is critical to maintaining the availability of your FTP server. To better understand why it is important you should have a little knowledge of how an FTP server operates. Initially, when you connect to your FTP server, a single FTP process is spawned. This process is spawned to manage the connection but does not manage transferring your data itself. Once you begin to transfer files across the connection additional processes will be spawned to handle the transfer up to the FTP process limit imposed by your hosting provider. As you can see, generally speaking, successful use of an FTP server will use more than one process. Your FTP client does control the number of processes that are spawned and when those processes will die off after the transfer is complete. Now that we have a simplistic description of what is happening we can also establish why proper use of your FTP client is important to maintaining server availability. As you can see there is some responsibility placed on your FTP client to manage the FTP connection and processes. If a disconnection is handled improperly, your FTP client isn't allowed to clean up after itself and can potentially leave FTP processes running on your server indefinitely. This only becomes a problem when you try to establish a connection to your FTP server and the FTP processes left running from improper disconnects are equal to or higher than your FTP process limit. To allow your FTP client to properly close the connection you should find and utilize the disconnect function if your client supports the functionality. You should avoid simply closing the application unless this is the only option that your client supports.