The Demo FTP Server

For some time, I have been blogging about a demo program showing the Indy FTP Server. 

This was contributed from the "Indy Demos" mailing list and I worked on it further on my own.  The reason I did that was to do some testing in the FTP server when developing some newer features.

In the process, I've learned a good deal and I was able to fix some major bugs that effected path processing (it was handled in an inconsistent manner) and I also used it for testing the MLST command and that lead to the OnMLST event I blogged about earlier.  It turned out to be more important than I originally thought because NcFTP was using that to see if a file existed.  In addition, I had started using it for a SITE UTIME event that I may blog about later.  Then, I had another bug with the OPTS MLST command and that had broken on NcFTP.

The point I'm trying to make is that often, when writing a demo, you can uncover quite a number of problems and see how something works as you code it.  That is important as there are often gaps between your theories and reality.  In practice, coding and the component are almost one in the same.  Do not underestimate the virtue of eating your own dogfood.

The only thing I would note is that this demo is intended as a starting point for developers to work from.  It should not be used in production environments at all.  I tested it only behind a NAT and it had no access outside of my internal network.  In reality, you usually require strong access controls along with authentication and security (such as SSL).   For stronger controls, you would typically write your own file-system access control code or use something like Windows NT authentication along with impersonation.

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