Now let's look at concepts and tasks associated with the FTP Publishing Service (the FTP service). We begin by examining the Default FTP Site included as an example when you install Windows 2000 Server. We then look at common tasks such as creating new FTP sites and virtual directories. We can move fairly quickly here because these tasks are similar to those you just learned for the WWW Publishing Service.
Like the WWW service, installing the FTP service on a Windows 2000 server creates a new default site called the Default FTP Site. (The WWW service and the FTP service are both installed by default whenever you install the core Internet Information Services on Windows 2000 Server, but you can remove either of them using Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel.) Unlike the Default Web Site, with its sample pages and numerous directories, however, the Default FTP Site is completely empty. This is singularly uninteresting, so let's move on!
As with the WWW service, you can create as many different FTP sites as you want using IIS 5, and you can host the content (pages, images, and other files) for these sites in either local directories or network shares. Each FTP site acts as a separate entity, or virtual server, and acts as if it were running on its own Windows 2000 server using the full resources available to it on that server. To illustrate this, we'll create a new FTP site on the server WS1, place a test file in its home directory, and then download the test file from another machine on the network.
As with Web sites, you can specify FTP sites on an internetwork in a variety of ways, including using the site's IP address, NetBIOS name, or fully qualified DNS name. For the present example, use the extra IP address that was bound to the network card on the server WS1 in the previous section. You must also create a home directory for the new FTP site, so you'll create the folder D:\Ftphome on the local server. (For safety, content should be on any drive other than the system drive.) Then you'll copy a bitmap file like \Winnt\Greenstone.bmp to the D:\Ftphome directory so you'll have something to download from the client. Follow these steps to create the new FTP site:
Figure 28-22. The new Scribes FTP Site shown in the Internet Information Services console window.
To test the new FTP site, go to a different machine on the network, start Internet Explorer 5, and open the URL ftp://172.16.11.203, which specifies the new FTP site using its associated IP address. The file Greenstone.bmp should be displayed in the browser window, along with the IP address you're connecting to and the user name Anonymous (Figure 28-23).
Figure 28-23. Connecting to the new Scribes FTP Site using Internet Explorer 5.
Once you've connected to the FTP site, you can perform various actions in Internet Explorer, including the following:
Now isn't that more fun than using the old text-based FTP command from the command prompt?
You can create virtual directories for FTP sites just as you can for Web sites. Let's look at this briefly now.
You've already seen the Virtual Directory Creation Wizard. It doesn't matter whether you create the virtual directory within a Web site or within an FTP site—the same wizard creates them. Just for variety, because you created a remote virtual directory for the Scribes Ltd. Web site last time, this time, create a local virtual directory for the Scribes FTP Site. (The following steps are compressed because you're already familiar with the wizard.)
The new local virtual directory /Drop is now visible as the node underneath the Scribes FTP Site node in the console tree (Figure 28-24). Note that the icon used to represent FTP virtual directories is different from the ones used to represent Web virtual directories.
Figure 28-24. The /Drop virtual directory within the Scribes FTP Site.
Try accessing the new virtual directory from a remote machine by opening the URL http://172.16.11.203/drop virtual directory on the Scribes FTP Site using Internet Explorer. A message should appear in a dialog box saying, "An error occurred opening that folder on the FTP Server. Make sure you have permission to access that folder." Click OK to close the error message.
Now try dragging a file from My Computer into the browser window. Verify on the server WS1 that the file was indeed uploaded to the \Uploads directory on the server. Now try refreshing the browser window. The same error message appears as before. Click OK to close the error message, and the browser window—which is still open to the /Drop virtual directory—should appear empty. This verifies that anonymous users can upload files to the virtual directory but can't view or download files from it.