FTP Data Synchronization for Fun-II: the FileZilla server

Most people, including me, were less familiar with File Transfer Protocol (FTP) than the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which we use every time we visit websites. Working on FTP there was a great deal of frustrations. But I enjoyed that immensely and before I forget, let me tell you that all the work for the FTP server side was done on my Windows-7 laptop.

The FTP server I choose to work with is the FileZilla FTP server. It is free and you could download it here. As usual I double clicked on the downloaded file to install it and just accepted the defaults when installation asked me. After installing you open the FileZilla server by double clicking its shortcut on the desktop.

Now click “Connect”. Then do (1) to (4) as shown below:

Then to create the user account (supervisor), follow steps (5) to (7) below.

Now you'll see the user “supervisor” account created and highlighted. Then you should enter a password for the supervisor account. I've written the password in the “Description” space for supervisor just for the sake of showing it.

Then you need to create a directory to be shared. Let's first create this folder on drive D, and at D:\CSEntry\data\. Then follow step (11) and (12) on the FileZilla server as shown below:

After clicking “Add” a popup menu will appear with which you browse for the directory D:\CSEntry\data\. You will see that an “H” has been added at the side of this directory to denote home directory. Now select this newly created home directory and add permissions to Write Files, and Create Directories.

By now, we managed to create the following credentials to connect to the FileZilla FTP server. The connection is specifically meant for a supervisor to connect to the FTP server using his/her Android mobile phone.

• Connection to the WiFi network ninjaFTP on which the FTP server resides (see the last post).
• The supervisor account to connect to the FTP server with password = superV@007.
• The shared folder D:\CSEntry\data\ which is designated as the home directory with additional permissions for supervisor account to write files and create directories.

Still, we need the address of the FTP server for the supervisor account to connect to. Here's how you could find that out: open the Network and Sharing Center on you desktop or laptop again. Then complete step (13) and (14).

To test if you can log in to the FTP server do the following.

First open WiFi on your Android phone. In our last post we've shown how to

create the access point “ninjaFTP” on the laptop/desktop. It should now appear on the WiFi screen and already connected. If not connected yet, connect to it.

For the next step you need to have CSEntry (available on Google Play store) installed on your Android mobile phone. Now, when you tap the CSEntry logo on your phone the Entry Applications page opens. Tap on the three dots at the upper right corner (1), and go on working with these steps:

Finally after entering the password, tap “Connect”. If the connection with the FTP server is successful, CSEntry should responded with “No files”. What? Have we gone wrong?

No!! It is OK because CSEntry was looking for a .pnc or .pff file and there was none. Recall that what we were doing was testing to see if FTP communication works. And we see that it does!

To try sending and receiving actual data over FTP we still need to do some work on the CSEntry side.