The FTP Server is a basic implementation intended to facilitate one-button document publishing tools and to provide a means for copying files between Windows 95/NT machines when no other FTP daemons are available. The FTP Server does not support virtual hosts, so the FTP configuration applies to all virtual hosts defined for a web site.

FTP User Management
All Sambar Server users are configured using the User Management forms within the System Administration area. When creating a new user (or updating an existing user), you can set their FTP priviledges including read/write access and the directory to which they are restricted. Each user can be granted access to a single directory and will then have access to all files and directories under that directory.

Important: Unless you want all users to have anonymous access to your FTP Server, it is recommended that the "anonymous" user be deleted. At the very least, you will likely want to change the directory to which the "anonymous" user is restricted. When users connect to your FTP Server via browser using ftp://your-server, the browser sends "anonymous" as the username. The default user configuration allows this user read-only access to all files in the Documents Directory.

FTP Server Limitations
There are two significant limitations to the FTP server that should be noted:

• Only PASV mode is supported.
• Users are restricted to a single directory.

The PASV mode restriction mainly affects older FTP tools that haven't implemented the PASV mode command for file transfer (also affects directory listing commands). If your FTP tool "hangs" after connecting to the FTP server and performing a list command, its likely because of this feature limitation. There are no immediate plans to implement the older data transfer mechanism.

Limiting users to a single directory was implemented for security reasons. Often though, it is useful to allow a user to view several directories (while still restricting their access). It is unlikely that the Sambar Server will extend the user security restriction beyond a single directory, with the exception of the "all access" feature. The directory security restriction can be bypassed for a user by defining their "FTP Directory" as star (*). Users with this designation are able to change to any hard drive on the disk and may access any file on the system. It is recommended that this feature be used with extreme caution.

FTP Login/Logout Messages
The FTP login/logout messages are read from the config/macros.ini file at the startup of the server. Specifically, the macros FTP_WELCOME and FTP_GOODBYE are read in and returned to users logging in/out of the FTP Server.

Connecting via username
With most browsers, you can access your server via the URL:

ftp://<username>:<password>@<your-server>/

Valid Filenames
The Sambar Server restricts filenames to the alpha-numeric characters, spaces, and the following "special" characters:

_-$~)(!#

At the present time, these restrictions cannot be changed in the server.