ITauthor

The problem:
Set up command-line FTP access to a Windows 2003 Server machine to allow scripts to save files to that server via FTP.

The solution:
FileZilla - but you need to know the recipe of the secret sauce!

I started by installing Windows own FTP server (an extra Windows component that you can add via Add/Remove Programs). I then enabled this in the IIS Manager. However, the problem I got was that, although I could FTP to the server I couldn't save anything, do an ls or a pwd or anything useful.

So plan 2, after disabling Windows FTP, was to use FileZilla. This is an open source FTP/SCP project and you can download server and client software here:

http://filezilla-project.org/

However, I'd recently installed Apache/PHP/MySQL using the very wonderful XAMPP (see XAMPP - Web server + MySQL in minutes), so I already had FileZilla, I just hadn't enabled it. I did so and everything seemed to work except that when I FTPed to the machine as any user, with a legitimate password I'd get a "530 Login or password incorrect" message:

C:\Documents and Settings\ac>ftp showcase.memex.co.uk
Connected to showcase.memex.co.uk.
220-FileZilla Server version 0.9.23 beta
220-written by Tim Kosse (Tim.Kosse@gmx.de)
220 Please visit http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla/
User (myserver.myorg.co.uk:(none)): Administrator
331 Password required for administrator
Password:
530 Login or password incorrect!
Login failed.

The secret is that you have to go into the Admin program for FileZilla and add users/groups in there, specifically assigning each access to parts of the file system and defining what they can do (e.g. read, write, etc).

With XAMPP this is easy. From the XAMPP Control Panel, click Admin for FileZilla:

Enter the Administrator password:

Create groups with the appropriate access rights. Then create users and assign them to a group:

Now you can open up a command console on a remote machine, enter ftp servername and log in to the server to put/get files as required.