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Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional
If your organization has a need for dedicated resources for transferring large files, you can save the hassle of firewall or security problems that result when your email software doesn't allow you to accept email attachments from unknown sources by creating an FTP site. If your company is like most companies these days, it doesn't have a lot of money to spend on purchasing another Windows server, so taking advantage of Windows XP Professional's FTP capabilities, which include an updated version of US (Internet Information Services) 5.1, can allow you to host an FTP site to provide a centralized file receptacle for the users in your organization.
FTP at a glance
In this article, we'll show you how you can take advantage of the power of Windows XP to create and administer an FTP site. First, we'll provide some basics on FTP and how you can use it effectively within your organization. Next, we'll show you how to properly install and configure US to take advantage of this feature. Then, we'll go a step further by showing you how to secure your FTP site. And finally, we'll show you how to use Office XP to open and save files directly to your FTP site.
Taking you back to the basics
FTP is a protocol that's used for transferring files. FTP is similar to HTTP in that they both use the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to transport data. The only difference between the two is that FTP is session-oriented. If you're new to FTP, the term session-oriented means that after you upload or download files, you stay connected until you log out. Not only can you log on to an FTP server and browse to a file that you need to download, but you can upload files as well.
The FTP server uses ports 20 and 21 in order to function properly. Port 20 is used by default to send and receive data and is only open when your data is being transferred. Port 21 acts as an operator by listening for clients that want to establish a connection. FTP clients or users connecting to an FTP server use a dynamically assigned port, which ranges from 1024 to 5000....