I still haven’t found a replacement for the Microsoft SMTP service on my server at the office.  I haven’t been looking all that hard recently, because what I have is working (after a fashion) for now.  I’ll need to do something in the next few months, though, before things get out of hand.  Today I added an FTP service to my wish list.  Microsoft’s is fine for an anonymous FTP site, but if you want to authenticate users and provide directory permissions to prevent users from stepping on each other, the MS offering just won’t do.  It implements the bare minimum necessary to comply with the FTP Specification (RFC 959).  RFC959 was okay back in 1985, but there’s no security, no authentication, and not much of anything else.  Just simple file transfer.

My research lead me to Ipswitch Software‘s WS_FTP Server 2.0.  It looks like this package has everything I’ve been looking for in an FTP server.  And $395 is cheap.  I’ve spent that much just trying to get the Windows 2000 FTP service to do things that it just can’t do.  I’ve been using Ipswitch’s WS_FTP Pro client at home for years, and have been very happy with it.  If their server is anywhere near as good, I’ll buy it.