Filezilla is using a wrong assumption on directory access

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seaktf · #1 Post by **seaktf** » 2006-01-24 13:54

I've set up an FTP server for my company so that our customers could upload important files to us. (No, we can't only use mails because those files can be as big as several hundreds of MByte!)

Because of confidentiality reason, the FTP site is set up such that a normal FTP user can NOT list the directory content (because not knowing the names of existant files means it's quite hard to download files from other customers of ours). But he can upload his files inside, ie a PUT command is accepted while a LS command would return 550.

We usually advice our customers to use I.E. but some prefer to use FileZilla. Fine. But there's a problem (which is easy to guess for experts):
FileZilla sends out a LIST command to our FTP server once connected and in return it receives 550. FileZilla then thinks it can't access the directory and refuse to upload anything.

This assumption is purely wrong. So, do the developers have any plan to change this behaviour? For example, when someone drag 'n drops a file to a directory which was "marked" 550, FileZilla could pop up a dialog asking if he really wants to send the file despite the 550 error code.

If someone has some other alternative ideas, I'd also like to hear, like for example, a way to make files invisible to users. I'm using the embedded FTP server of IIS in a Win2000 server because it was easy to set up and quick. I'm willing to change the FTP server if I could be assured that it fulfills all our requirements.

seaktf · #2 Post by **seaktf** » 2006-01-27 13:11

Someone here?

#3 Post by **botg** » 2006-01-28 11:34

Planned for FZ3, changing the ftp engine of FZ2 would probably reintroduce too much bugs.

Another, cleaner solution would be to give each customer its own account on the ftp server. That way they can see their own files but not the files of other customers.

seaktf · #4 Post by **seaktf** » 2006-02-21 17:00

botg wrote:Planned for FZ3, changing the ftp engine of FZ2 would probably reintroduce too much bugs.

Another, cleaner solution would be to give each customer its own account on the ftp server. That way they can see their own files but not the files of other customers.

We have more than 50 customers. Making one account for each one is not an acceptable solution. Creating them takes time, but especially maintaining them takes even more time and effort. I don't want our hotline employees waste their time keeping tracks about which customer is using which account and what password.