In a previous blog I explained why I no longer had an ftp site (I gave that privilege to my wife - see my blog http://community-info.org/sftp.htm). I was referring to an Anonymous ftp site, using port 21. In that blog I also told about my new, secure ftp site. Secure ftp uses port 22, which browsers aren't setup to visit. In fact, PCs don't have access to port 22, either; i.e., you can't just type "sftp" and goto a secure ftp site. So I've been lamenting the loss of my anonymous ftp site.
Recently my wife told me she no longer wanted an anonymous ftp site, but wanted me to require her visitors to enter a username and password to visit her ftp sites (plural; she wanted different sites for different visitors). The IIS 7.5 server (that's the one I've been using for my web sites and anonymous ftp site) supports "User Isolation". User isolation does just what I wanted; it lets you create a multitude of ftp sites, as long as they all require unique username-password combinations. User isolation also lets you create a directory for anonymous log in. I had a way to get my anonymous ftp site back!
Here's my anonymous ftp site while using user isolation:
I'm also able to log into one of the password protected sites, too:
So everything works, great! Unfortunately, it's still not what I want. You see, when I log into my website I don't get a login screen; it goes right to my anonymous site. As you can see in the above picture, I can log into the different ftp sites from a command prompt. So, you could say the setup works, but I want visitors to the ftp web page to be able to log into the different ftp directories. Well, I can set that up too, but then you can't log into the anonymous site (not even from a command prompt).
Anonymous ftp actually does log in as a user; IUSR. IUSR is a user defined in IIS, but it isn't defined as a local user of the system or as a domain user in an active direrctory. Yet, I have to define IUSR as the user Anonymous or Anonymous can't log in. ...but if I don't define IUSR as the Anonymous user, then user isolation works for all local user on my Windows system (which is the way I'm going to leave my ftp site), but Anonymous can't log in.
