How do I point ftp.xxx.com to my ftp site?

[Kevin Darcy]

I think there is basic misunderstanding here. FTP and HTTP are different
protocols, different "languages", as it were. It's not enough to just get
the web client connected to the FTP server at a network level; once they
are connected, they won't be able to understand each other. The browser
says "GET"; the server expected something more like "RETR". See the
problem? The "http" or "ftp" at the beginning of the URL tells the browser
not only what default port to use (which can be overridden, by the way) but
also which protocol or "language" to speak on that connection. The URL you
specified tells the browser to speak HTTP to an FTP server. Doesn't work
too well.

The closest you can come to what the requestor wants, I think, is to make
up a web form which would allow the user to specify what files they want to
get and/or put, and then have a backend program which would *gateway* (i.e.
act as a bilingual translator) between the HTTP and FTP protocols. That's
probably not what the requestor had in mind.

Note that none of this really has anything to do with DNS.


- Kevin

choster at my-deja.com wrote:

> I've setup an ftp site in IIS and it is accessible via both our (very
> small office) _only_ static ip on the far side of our router and by
> using ftp://www.domainname.com.
>
> I've been asked to set it up so that http://ftp.domainname.com will get
> to the ftp server as well. Why? Don't ask me I just fix things.
>
> My problem is that we only have one static IP address so I can't just
> redirect ftp.domainname.com (which is registered) to a different IP
> that is externally accessible. i've tried using NAT to redirect port 21
> (which is what our ftp site is using) to a different internal address.
> This works, but only if you access the ftp site using an ftp client or
> ftp://www.domainname.com. If you use http://ftp.domainname.com it
> redirects to the web page located at http://www.domainname.com.
>
> Grrr... Any thoughts?
>
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> Before you buy.