The internet and the technologies that make it useful have improved quickly in the last 20 years. Along the way some technologies have slowly dropped off as they were replaced by newer and better inventions. Demands for improvements in user experience, security, performance, and other web-related features have turned what once were common, well-established internet services into fading memory. That’s not to say that all the old services don’t still provide value—you’ll see that in this chapter. But when was the last time you used Gopher to find something on the internet? (If you haven’t heard of Gopher, that’s kind of my point.)
Microsoft IIS supports two services you may still run across or need in your career as a webmaster: the venerable File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and an email relay service that uses Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). In this chapter you’ll help the WebBikez shop establish an FTP site for customers to download bicycle manuals and a secured FTP site for the development team to upload new web applications. You’ll also get a chance to examine the Windows built-in SMTP relay service sometimes used for transferring email.
Open your lunch sack and get ready to help WebBikez shop with the first focus of this chapter: FTP.