FTP is File Transfer Protocol. A very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP is a way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. FTP was invented and in wide use long before the advent of the World Wide Web and originally was always used from a text-only interface.
I am working in an environment where the administrator of my company has firewall installed and blocking a lot of ports including FTP.
A lot of drivers are also located in FTP but not WWW. My working place has about 800 computers and I am in constant need of downloading and updated the latest drivers. Now how can I do that when I can’t access FTP?
No matter what type of FTP client I install, it won’t work because port 21, which the port that FTP uses, is blocked.
Do not worry as there is a way around this. This method can be considered as bypassing firewalls, routers, and proxy servers in order to upload and download through FTP even if it is blocked.
You can use Web based FTP to access any FTP account through a Web interface – no matter whether there is a firewall or not. You can use webftp for the complete administration of your homepage, downloading files or just making small changes.
All you need is a web browser, the FTP server, username and password. To download drivers, usually the FTP server will allow anonymous connections to their FTP.
I’ve searched and tried a few web based FTP and I can say that Web2FTP works the best for me.
By visiting Web2FTP, you will have 3 choices of FTP login.
1. The normal FTP login where you need your FTP server, port, username and password.
2. FTP with that requires SSL-Login
3. FTP anonymous login where mostly used to download drivers
Once logged in, you’ll be presented with an web based FTP interface on your browser which looks like the image below.
The only improvement I think should be done is to have automatic transfer mode. Currently you’ll need to select either BINARY or ASCII. For BINARY, you must use this mode for everything that contains binary data as pictures and other files that are not text only. This mode is preset at www2ftp. As for ASCII, this mode is used for transferring text files. If the server is running on Unix you must use this mode for text files as the line endings are different. The ASCII-mode will convert the line endings to unix line endings removing the “CR” from the file.
There is another limitation where you can only download and upload files no bigger than 50MB. Files, which you want to transfer from or to your ftp server are stored temporarily on web2ftp server and processed by www2ftp. This limitation is to offer to all users a stable service and to protect against overloading to web FTP server.
In order to be able to log in on your ftp server, web2ftp must know your ftp password. This password is transferred from your browser to web2ftp and from there to your ftp server. An encrypted transmission of your server data to web2ftp (and the server reply back to you) is possible with the SSL Login. This is no different from any other FTP client and is thereby no characteristic of web2ftp..
For technical reasons web2ftp needs your ftp password with each ftp command you execute, therefore web2ftp stores your password for the duration of the session locally. This has the advantage that your password does not need to be sent continuously between your browser and web2ftp. The password is stored in a file inaccessible to the public, and totally unrelated to your username. Additionally the password is encrypted by DES with a public and private key. If someone gets access to this file (which is nearly impossible) and decodes the password, your password is nevertheless worthless to him. The connection between password and user name is made by a session ID, which is put in hidden HTML fields together with the server data. The stored password can be only used, if both the randomly produced session ID and the user name are known. This information is only known by you!
The password file is deleted together with the session ID when you press the Logout Button. This guarantees that the browser’s or any proxy’s cached copies of the HTML pages cannot be used any longer. If you forget to logout your password file is deleted automatically after 60 minutes of inactivity! Files downloaded by the ftp server are transferred automatically by web2ftp to your computer. Only you have access to these files as there is an htaccess file that limits the access to your IP address. If another internet user should know the name and the directory of the downloaded file (which is highly improbable), the download attempt would fail as their IP would get rejected
Of course they claim that they do not store any personal data. Activity-related data is stored only for statistics purposes and deleted after the regular evaluation. Of course they will keep this data secret. Again it is pointed out that all passwords are deleted after use! With web2ftp it is neither necessary nor possible to register and store personal data. Therefore abuse of such data is generally impossible!
This web based FTP service to bypass firewall, proxy and router is FREE. I hope it will maintain the way it is.
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