Ftp – Getting modified year of file via FTP

Since standard FTP uses multiple (randomly selected) ports to communicate, you can't just tunnel one port like you could with most other protocols.

If you had control over the FTP server, you could configure it to force passive mode and use only a specific range of ports. It'd also have to lie about its address (or else your client would have to be configurable to ignore the address given by the server). Then you could set up putty to forward every port in that range to the FTP server.

Ask your host if there is any way you can scp files to the FTP server instead of using FTP. If so, you can set putty up to tunnel from Source Port insert whatever here to Destination ftpserveripaddress:22 (Done under Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels). Then in winscp, connect to localhost:sourceport

I finally got it to work, but there's some things I've learnt:

• IIS will let you configure the ports that the FTP server will use for passive mode. But, for me, this did NOT take affect until I restarted the service named "Microsoft FTP Service"

• When I looked at the inbound firewall rules, I saw three preconfigured rules:

  • FTP Server (FTP Traffic-In)
  • FTP Server Passive (FTP Passive Traffic-in)
  • FTP Server Secure (FTP SSL Traffic In)

These rules looked like just what I needed. But for some reason, they didn't actually do anything. When I created my OWN rules specifying exactly the same things, it worked. (Apparently, I'm not the first to encounter this problem, see this posting.)