Robert McMurray : FTP

eWeek Reviews for IIS 7.5 and FTP 7.5

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:45:00 GMT

One of my coworkers, Vijay Sen, just forwarded the following eWeek review of IIS 7.5 to me: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Windows/REVIEW-Microsoft-IIS-75-Improves-Management-Deployment-Options-822018/ The review was written by Jim Rapoza , and he said some great things about IIS 7.5, which ships with both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 client. But what really made my day was the following things that he said about FTP 7.5: Another welcome change in IIS 7.5 is the elevation of FTP as a full-fledged part of the server. In previous versions, setup and management of an FTP server in IIS were done pretty much separately from Web server management. In IIS 7.5, FTP administration is fully integrated into the IIS Management Console. I found this to...(read more)

FTP 7.5 Extensibility and Visual Studio Express Editions

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:19:00 GMT

In earlier blog posts I have mentioned that I written the several walkthroughs to help developers get started writing providers for the FTP 7.5 service, all of which available on Microsoft's learn.iis.net Web site under the " Developing for FTP 7.5 " section. In each of these walkthroughs I wrote the steps as if you were using Visual Studio 2008. Following up on that, I received a great question yesterday from a customer, Paul Dowdle, who wondered if it was possible to write an extensibility provider for the FTP 7.5 service using one of the Visual Studio Express Editions. By way of coincidence, I used to install Visual C# Express Edition on my laptop when I was traveling around the world to speak at events like TechEd . I usually did this because...(read more)

Hiding your FTP Server Type and Preventing Unauthorized Access

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:05:00 GMT

As evidenced by my How to Use Managed Code (C#) to Create an FTP Authentication Provider with Dynamic IP Restrictions walkthrough and my other FTP authentication extensibility walkthroughs, I spend a lot of time trying to find ways to prevent unauthorized access to my FTP server while still allowing valid users to have easy access to their site content. Today's blog discusses several of the ideas that I like to use on my FTP servers. Preventing Unauthorized Access To start things off, I globally disable FTP Basic Authentication on my server and I only use custom authentication providers. Since my FTP users do not have actual accounts on my server or my domain, that helps prevent access to my physical server. It was for this reason that I wrote...(read more)

Creating Recursive Directory Listing Files for FTP Clients

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:39:00 GMT

One of the changes that we made in FTP 7.0 and FTP 7.5 was to remove recursive directory listings, which are commonly retrieved by typing " ls -lR " from a command-line FTP client, which should send a command like " NLST -lR " over FTP to the server. There were several reasons why we decided to remove recursive directory listings, but the main reason was simply to reduce CPU usage on the server; recursive directory listing requests take a lot of resources to fulfill. With that in mind, both FTP 7.0 and FTP 7.5 will ignore the recursive switch on directory requests. That being said - quite often it's pretty handy to have a full directory listing from an FTP server. From a client perspective you could probably write script to automate an FTP client...(read more)

Merging FTP Extensibility Walkthroughs - Part 2

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:36:00 GMT

I had not intended to do a series on this subject when I wrote my original Merging FTP Extensibility Walkthroughs blog post, but I came up with a scenario that I felt was worth sharing. I recently posted the following walkthrough on the learn.iis.net web site: How to Use Managed Code (C#) to Create an FTP Authentication Provider with Dynamic IP Restrictions We have had many customer requests for a dynamic IP restrictions provider for the FTP server, and I wanted to get that out to customers as soon as I could. That being said, like several of my extensibility walkthroughs in the past, I wrote and tested the provider in that walkthrough on one of the servers that I manage. To show how effective it was, within the first couple of hours the provider...(read more)

Automatically Creating Checksum Files for FTP Uploads

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:01:00 GMT

I had a great question in the publishing forums on forums.iis.net , where someone was asking if FTP 7 supported the XCRC command. The short answer is that the XCRC command is not supported, but I came up with a way to create an FTP provider that supports something like it. Since it was a rather fun code sample to write, I thought that I'd turn it into a blog. The sample FTP provider code in this blog post will automatically calculate an MD5 checksum from a file that is uploaded and store it in a file with a "*.MD5.TXT" file name extension. You can then compare the uploaded checksum with a local checksum on the client to verify the uploaded file's integrity. There are a few points that I need to discuss before I present the code sample: I chose...(read more)

Merging FTP Extensibility Walkthroughs

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:43:00 GMT

Over the past several months I’ve been publishing a series of walkthroughs that use the extensibility in FTP 7.5 to create a several custom providers for a variety of scenarios, and today I posted my most recent entry in the series: How to Use Managed Code to Create an FTP Authentication Provider using an XML Database As a piece of behind-the-scenes trivia, some of these walkthroughs were based off custom providers that I had actually written for my FTP servers, and I used the samples that I wrote for some of the other walkthroughs as a starting point for custom providers that I currently use. With that in mind, I’d like to use today’s blog to talk about some of the ways that I combine what you see in a few of these walkthroughs into some useful...(read more)

Using LogParser with FTP 7.x Sessions

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:15:00 GMT

One of the great features that we added to our W3Clogging enhancements in FTP 7.0 and FTP 7.5 is the ability to track unique sessions, which are represented by GUIDs in a field that is named x-session . Because of this addition, you can do some interesting things with LogParser when analyzing your FTP logs. The purpose of today's blog is to show a couple of the scripts that I use to analyze some of the session-based information that I'm interested in from time to time. Using LogParser to Count FTP Sessions Since the new FTP service tracks unique sessions, it is now possible to generate reports that show the number of unique FTP sessions you served by day. The following batch file accomplishes this in two parts: first it creates a temporary tab...(read more)

FTP Clients - Part 6: Core FTP LE

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:10:00 GMT

For this installment in my series about FTP Clients, I'd like to take a look at the Core FTP client. For this blog post I used Core FTP Lite Edition (LE) version 1.3c (build 1447) and version 2.1 (build 1603), although all of my screen shots are from version 2.1. Core FTP is available from the following URL: http://www.coreftp.com/ At the time of this blog post, Core FTP provides the LE for free and charges a small fee for a professional version. Like most graphical FTP clients, the Core FTP LE user interface is pretty easy to use and rather straight-forward - you have separate windows for your local and remote files/folders, as well as a logging window that lists the FTP commands that are sent and the FTP server's responses: Core FTP LE has...(read more)

BLOG - FTP 7.5 Service Extensibility References

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:23:00 GMT

As I pointed out in my recent blog post that was titled " FTP 7.5 and WebDAV 7.5 have been released ", one of the great new features of the FTP 7.5 service is extensibility. In that blog post I mentioned that I wrote the following walkthroughs to help developers get started writing providers for the FTP 7.5 service, and these walkthroughs are all available on Microsoft's learn.iis.net Web site: For Managed Code Developers: How to Use Managed Code to Create a Simple FTP Authentication Provider How to Use Managed Code to Create a Simple FTP Home Directory Provider How to Use Managed Code to Create a Simple FTP Logging Provider For Native Code Developers: How to Use Native Code to Create a Simple FTP Authentication Provider How to Use Native Code...(read more)

FTP 7.5 and WebDAV 7.5 have been released!

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:29:00 GMT

Over the next few days you're going to hear a lot of details about many of the great new IIS extensions that the IIS feature team is releasing for the 2009 MIX Conference in Las Vegas later today. I don't want to spoil any surprises by talking about anyone else’s feature areas, but I’m about to board a plane to head out on vacation (to Peru!) and I'm not taking a computer with me (believe it or not!) so I thought that I’d take a moment to highlight just a few of the features that are in the FTP 7.5 and WebDAV 7.5 releases. FTP 7.5 One of the great new features in FTP 7.5 is extensibility . We had some extensibility features that were partially implemented in FTP 7.0, and we used those for the ASP.NET and IIS Manager authentication providers...(read more)

FTP Clients - Part 5: MOVEit Freely Command-Line Secure FTP Client

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 06:10:05 GMT

For this installment in my series about FTP Clients, I'd like to take a look at the MOVEit Freely Command-Line Secure FTP Client ("FTPS.EXE") from Ipswitch. For this blog post I used MOVEit Freely FTP Client version 5.0.0.0, and it is available from the following URL: http://www.ipswitchft.com/products/moveit/client/freely/ At the time of this blog post, Ipswitch is providing the MOVEit Freely FTP client for free, although you are required to fill out a registration page with a short questionnaire. For more information on the license for the MOVEit Freely command-line FTP client, please see Ipswitch's web site . If you're like me and you like to script a lot of batch jobs on your servers, the MOVEit Freely command-line FTP client can...(read more)

FTP Clients - Part 4: FileZilla

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:25:00 GMT

For this next installment in my FTP Clients series, I'd like to take a look at the FileZilla FTP client. For this blog post I was using FileZilla version 3.1.6. There are a lot of places where you can find FileZilla, but the best location is the official FileZilla web site at http://filezilla-project.org/ . The FileZilla FTP client is freeware, so you can't beat the price. ;-] The user interface is pretty straight-forward: you have separate windows for your local and remote files/folders, as well as a logging window that lists the FTP commands that are sent and the FTP server's responses. FileZilla has a great Site Manager feature, which allows you to store commonly-used connections to FTP sites. Using FTP over SSL (FTPS) When creating a connection...(read more)

FTP Clients - Part 3: Creating a Global Listener FTP Site

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:02:00 GMT

In my " FTP Clients - Part 1: Web Browser Support " blog post, I mentioned creating a secured Global Listener FTP Site when you're working with FTP virtual hosts, but I didn't really explain what I meant by that or why you would want to do this. With that in mind, today's blog post is to describe how and why you might want to create a Global Listener FTP Site. To start things off, the concept is really simple - a Global Listener FTP Site is an FTP site with no virtual host binding and anonymous access disabled. It's kind of like having a "Default FTP Site" with restricted access. Here's why this is a good idea when you're working with FTP virtual hosts - some clients default to anonymous, like web browsers, and if anonymous succeeds then the...(read more)

FTP Clients - Part 2: Explicit FTPS versus Implicit FTPS

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:46:00 GMT

In part 2 of my series on FTP clients, I thought it would be best to have a discussion about the differences between Implicit FTPS and Explicit FTPS . In my recent " FTP Clients - Part 1: Web Browser Support " blog post, I referenced Implicit and Explicit FTPS with a link to my Using FTP Over SSL walkthrough. But it occurred to me that some people may not understand the difference between the two, and my upcoming blog posts are going to build upon that knowledge, so I thought that a quick discussion of these two technologies would be prudent. FTP over SSL (FTPS) One of the many limitations of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a general lack of security; e.g. user names and passwords are transmitted in clear text, data is transferred with no...(read more)