IIS7 - FTP7 - Supporting Virtual Host names - Extended logging

As you all know that the brand new FTP7 server now supports adding multiple host names. This is similar to that of adding host headers to the web sites, but as name indicates, these Virtual Host names are Virtual.  The new FTP7 server which is available for download from here would support this behavior.

You still have 2 FTP servers shipped with Windows Server 2008 RC0. And, an important note to that is, you cannot install the new FTP7 server on RC0, if you have selected to install the old FTP server using Server Manager. Yo might need to remove the old FTP server and then need to install the new child!

You can read more about FTP7 and its support to Virtual Host names here. In this post, I'm going to just give you some more information on Virtual Host names and also on the extended logging. If you want to know how to create an FTP site in IIS7, please go here.

So, how do you logon to the FTP server (supporting Virtual Host Names) using a command prompt?

1. FTP servername
2. Enter the user name as virtualHostName|userName  (that's the pipe)
3. Enter the password

How do you logon to the FTP site which uses virtual host names from an IE7? Same format which you used for the old FTP server.

ftp://userName:password@server/

Since, you need to specify the VirtualHostName in the userName itself, it would become:

ftp://VirtualHostName|userName:password@server/

And, let's now see some more interesting things about the brand new FTP7 server on Windows Server 2008 RC0. If you go to the "FTP Logging" Feature of the FTP site, and click on the "Select W3C Fields..." button, you would see the below:

You might note one additional field added to the FTP logging - "Additional Information (x-debug)". This field would be very helpful in troubleshooting some common problems which occurs with the FTP site. If the VirtualHostName which you would pass along with the userName is invalid, you might see the x-debug field as "Hostname+didn't+match+any+configured+ftp+site."