Digital Download Filename Length

[YoPo Music]

I have posted about not being able to upload my digital download files to our new server but the filename length seems to be the problem...

As I've said in my other post - a lot of our DD files have very long file names. e.g Brokenheartstrings2m32s_Composer_Jonathan_Slatter_Publisher_Sounds_Visual_Copyright2007

Bearing in mind that Actinic renames these files with a number string at the front of the filename is there a limit on the number of characters you can use?

Also we had a weird thing where we couldn't FTP into the DD folder and delete a file - it would just dissconnect the server - well now I've noticed if we shorten the filenames we can delete them, but the ones with old very long names dump the server. The only way to delete those is to go in through the Pinbrook Control Panel.

Sorry I posted some of this before on the other thread but this filename thing seems to be the problem.

Thanks
J

[Duncan Rounding]

If these filenames were the same on your previous host then it must be a hosting limitation of some kind. The complete filename would typically be of the order:
12345Brokenheartstrings2m32s_Composer_Jonathan_Slatter_Publisher_Sounds_Visual_Copyright2007. mpg

This example would be 96 characters for example.

You could try experimenting and see how long the filename has to be before you can no longer delete it with your ftp client.

[pinbrook]

PB servers allow filenames up to 255 chars, maybe Actinic can now comment.

Yopo site is now uploading as Jono is shortening all his filenames.

One interesting issue vaguely linked to this is using Filezilla to delete longfilenames results in your being disconnected from server.

PB CP has an inbuilt filemamager which will allow deletion of these longfilenames.

Maybe Filezilla and Actinic are suffereing from the same issue. If anyone who uses other FTP programs could test this out it would be interesting.

Test use filenames over 64 chars and over 128. It also appears than Filezilla doesn't recognise duplicate file names if the differences in the name are in the 65th and later chars.

[EDIT] filezilla is ok with Duncan's example 96 char filename, but if you increase the filename to 133 chars it freaks [/EDIT]

[YoPo Music]

Well Actinic still haven't come back to me about the filename length but the person I spoke to said she didn't think there would be a limit. Point is that these same files uploaded and resided on the Fasthosts site no problem. So how can that be an Actinic issue?

Site is not loading it's failed again - and we now have some peculiar CGI BIN errors....so we're still turning clients away.

Not looking very good so far.
J

[Bruce]

Jono,

You must have heard back from support already on this issue. The length of the file name depends on the OS you upload to.

Kind regards,

[YoPo Music]

Yes we received an email yesterday afternoon saying:

This is in regards to your call about the Digital Downloads file name length. Development has got back to me saying that it is not the file length that caused the issue but it could be the filename which was after obfuscating must be a valid filename length for the Operating System to which it is uploaded.

Which I think means "yes". (sigh)

However we had already been pretty sure that it was that after trying various file lengths. However we still could not upload the site - it just aborted the ftp session after a while and have given up trying with that server. Site uploaded in full (about 4-5 gigs of DDs to Fasthosts) overnight last night.

Regards,
J