FTP Publishing on Windows Server 2008 with Amazon EC2 – Rough guide

AS A NOTE – WEB DEPLOY IS MUCH BETTER THAN FTP PUBLISHING - Just letting you know

This is my quick guide ( i.e. how i did it) on how to get FTP Publishing working on a Amazon Instance Website.

1. Install FTP Publishing using the Microsoft  Web Platform Installer
2. Under the IIS Manager, go to the server and run through the FTP items one by one:
   1. FTP Authentication – I just used basic authentication, but you can roll your own.
   2. Authorization Rules – I added a “Allow All Users Read Write”. You can be more exclusive
   3. Firewall support
      1. Specify a Data channel range. I used 28000 –> 28100
      2. Leave the external IP address empty. Seems to work well
   4. SSL Settings – Choose your certificate and allow SSL connections (Used with Explicit SSL over FTP)
   5. User Isolation – I have this set to FTP root directory
   6. Setup the Windows Firewall to allow the SSL connections to actually connect by running this command (credit for this tip goes to learn.iis.net)
      netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FTP for IIS7" service=ftpsvc action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in
3. Log into the Amazon Instance Manager or use Elastic Fox for Firefox (which is pretty cool) to access the security groups
   1. Add FTP port 21 with host 0.0.0.0/0
   2. Add the port range that you added before (e.g  28000 –> 28100) and set the host to 0.0.0.0/0
4. Add FTP publishing to a specific site
   1. Right click one of your sites in the IIS manager and select “Add FTP Site Publishing”
   2. Add a virtual host name if you feel the need, or require it to differentiate.
   3. Customise at will or let the server defaults handle the settings, then click Finish
5. Log into the site using a Windows login and  a good FTP client (e.g. like Filezilla) with the servertype as “FTPES – FTP over Explicit TLS/SSL” or if that doesn’t work, try just plain ol’ FTP (not recommended with a Windows Login). Hopefully there is no issue. If there is let me know what happens or how you fixed it if you did.