I have been helping out making an application to be used in many different countries by many different kinds of people, and I was planning to put a chapter on how to synchronize using FTP in the manual for the application.
I know very little about FTP, but have been warned that it is a mess to administer/use, as it uses two protocols for connection (one for data and one for communication), and it is either active FTP or passive, and it wants to connect to ports that might be closed in the firewalls etc etc..
And the person warning me ends up with stating "..but if you make sure that both port 20 and 21 are open in, configure the server to use port 20 for data, and make users use passive FTP, then you should be ok"
My problem is that the users/Administers of the application might not even have heard of FTP servers, and probably don't know anything about administer it, and the question is: Am I better of NOT mentioning this at all? What are the experiences if the forum?
Best, Anne
Synchronising using FTP
Re: Synchronising using FTP
There are two places I know of where they have used sync via FTP. One is for a household sample survey and the other for a pilot census. In both cases I don't believe that the server setup was a big problem. We helped them both with the client side of sync (the .pnc file) but they set up the servers themselves without our help. In both cases they had some IT people with some experience with servers and firewalls. Maybe someone from those two projects will chime in on this forum and give more details.
My experience has been that if you are using Windows Server with IIS there is a built-in FTP server that is not hard to configure. It is also not to hard to set up Filezilla, which is a free FTP server. I use Filezilla for testing. In both cases of course you do need to know how to open the appropriate ports on the firewall.
What gets more complicated is if you want to use FTP over TLS (an encrypted connection). For that you need to purchase an SSL certificate (if your organization does not already have one). Setting that up on Filezilla is pretty simple but on IIS the one time I tried to do it we ran into a bunch of problems and spent a lot of time dealing with the problem outlined here http://grantcurell.com/2013/12/31/faile ... ehind-nat/
If you have already have a website hosted in the cloud there is a good chance that it comes with a built in FTP server. Most web hosting companies let you upload the files for your website through FTP. On my hosted site this is the case and I am able to use it with CSPro without having to do any configuration other than adding FTP accounts.
My experience has been that if you are using Windows Server with IIS there is a built-in FTP server that is not hard to configure. It is also not to hard to set up Filezilla, which is a free FTP server. I use Filezilla for testing. In both cases of course you do need to know how to open the appropriate ports on the firewall.
What gets more complicated is if you want to use FTP over TLS (an encrypted connection). For that you need to purchase an SSL certificate (if your organization does not already have one). Setting that up on Filezilla is pretty simple but on IIS the one time I tried to do it we ran into a bunch of problems and spent a lot of time dealing with the problem outlined here http://grantcurell.com/2013/12/31/faile ... ehind-nat/
If you have already have a website hosted in the cloud there is a good chance that it comes with a built in FTP server. Most web hosting companies let you upload the files for your website through FTP. On my hosted site this is the case and I am able to use it with CSPro without having to do any configuration other than adding FTP accounts.