Blog Navigation
Partners
Latest Activity
Phil gives the source code for implementing a MySQL singleton class in both PHP and Python.
Making FTP Work on Windows Server 2003
As of late, I’ve been focusing many of my efforts into Windows more than on Linux. I suppose my only reason is because my Windows administration knowledge is quickly becoming outdated, but it is also because I spend 99.9% of my time developing and administrating Linux based machines. I am usually under the impression that Windows makes stuff so easy with the “next next next finish” principle, but Windows has just as many problems as Linux does, it just does not make them evident until you actually want to do something with Windows technology. The only great thing about Windows is that normally, the fix is 99 times easier than the same type of fix on a Linux based system.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been wanting to put together a Windows based web server for myself. Its purpose was originally to keep my Outlook 2007 application on Exchange open (to update my website calendar / update my webmail RSS feed folder). I’m beginning to run other stuff on the server (e.g. my instant messenger) so that I can have a better online presence (lets face reality, email isn’t as live as some of my friends would like). Since I chose to run Windows Server 2003, I decided that it might be worth my time to enable Internet Information Services and work on developing some ASP based web applications just for the fun of it. Of course, when the time is right, I will open up a few more accounts on the server through Matthouse for others who share my desire to learn ASP for fun. For those of you who are wondering, I’m waiting for a good billing system to come along, I have one, I’m simply waiting on the developer to make a few changes.
Anyways, today I was playing around with the server and I enabled FTP publishing so that I could easily upload a few files to the server through my local computer. Unfortunate for me, going to the windows components page under the control panel’s add/remove programs section to add FTP Publishing wasn’t enough. Sure enough, the server did install FTP and made it available in the Internet Information Services Manager section of the computer management console.
After I deleted the default ftp site and made a new site with isolated user home directories, ftp didn’t work correctly. Note that this server does not connect to nor run Windows Active Directory, so all the accounts are local. Anyways, after some research, I found that under the ftp root, I needed to add a folder called “LocalUser” and then I had to add the username of the account under that directory. To ensure that other users could not read files / data the directory, I changed permissions on the user folder to allow only that user and administrators access. At this point FTP began to sort of work!
I say sort of work because FTP only worked in active mode, meaning the Windows Firewall was getting in the way. After spending a few minutes looking for a solution, I figured that I would try adding the internet information services executable to the exceptions list. Sure enough, this fixed the passive mode problem. The steps I took to fix the problem were: 1. open up the Windows Firewall control panel console under the Windows control panel. I went to the exceptions tab and added a problem. I browsed for additional programs and added “C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\inetinfo.exe” to the exceptions list. After this was added, passive mode worked as expected.
Although Server 2003 is outdated by now, it is still a very stable system to do any experimental work on, which is why I choose to run it over a better and never version of Windows. It is also much cheaper to run than a newer version of Windows like the current Exchange Server which is running Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter.
Tags: Firewall, FTP, IIS, Microsoft
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
[...] FamousPhil Videos and Jokes » Making FTP Work on Windows Server 2003 [...]
[...] FamousPhil Videos and Jokes » Making FTP Work on Windows Server 2003 [...]