FREE Online Technical Support!

FREE Online Support

Now, more than ever, people want something for nothing, and why shouldn’t we?  It seems everything costs more now days.  South River Technologies believes that people deserve a break when it comes to seeking and receiving support. With every license purchased, customers receive FREE online technical support.  This goes beyond just a written Q&A section somewhere on the website.  Through our FREE online help desk, a submitted ticket is directed to the desk of a Technical Support Engineer (TSE); a live person willing to assist.

The FREE online technical support option is a breath of fresh air for those who want to get their own answers in their own time, never to bother a live person.  We also realize that when people choose live interaction, sometimes a simple email exchange is not enough. In those instances,  the TSE may request access to the computer to resolve the issue.  He or she will initiate a streaming session with no added cost to the customer. Should someone need to escalate the level of support, the TSE will provide direction in purchasing a phone support ticket or annual support contract.

Wait! Before you click to register your help ticket, take a few minutes to peruse the Knowledgebase Articles.  This FREE information will help you save time otherwise spent waiting in queue “for the next available representative.” This option provides 7×24 support to everyone, as our support center does not operate on a 24×7 schedule.

It is always a good idea to consider the no-cost options before requesting phone support. You will find a plethora of supporting documentation on our website; to include Quick Start Guides and User Guides. These documents are available to everyone and provide a wealth of information on installing and using our software products.

Check them out today, do it for FREE!

www.southrivertech.com

A Recipe for SFTP

Ingredients:

• Server (Select your own hardware; recommend Server class machine)
• Operating System (recommend Windows 2003, 2008 various flavors)
• *Licensed operational Titan Enterprise or MFT Server (other SFTP Servers can be used but not as flavorful as Titan)
• Port 22
• Client SFTP software (we like to use WebDrive; Mac or Windows flavor)
• 2 Host Key Pair, 1 for Server and 1 for Client
• 1 Password for Private Key pair (required for Titan Server)

*Note if you attempt to use single Licensed Titan Server in the same recipe, you will receive bad results

Preparation Time: 1 – 2 hours

Prep:

On your Server class machine, install your Operating system with either Windows 2003 or 2008 flavor, some people even like it with Windows XP.

Refer to: our Titan Host Key Quick Start Guide (Steps 1 – 7) for detailed instructions on preparing your Titan Server with SFTP.

Now that your Titan Server is ready, now you can add SFTP to make it incredible.

To make SFTP (SSH’s Secure File Transfer Protocol) on this server select this check box and choose the port number using the up/down arrows. Choose the host key set by using the drop down arrow. To use SFTP services, you will need a host key pair that will be used by the Titan FTP Server. Use the Host Key Management utility to either create a new host key pair to be used by the Titan FTP Server or to import an existing host key pair from an external file set. Once you have created a host key pair, select it from the list and then type the password associated with the host key.

*Port 22 is reserved for SSH (Secure Shell)/SFTP and is the default/recommended port.

Depending on your taste, choose your Host Key Type flavor: select a DSA host keys (must be 1024 bits in length), or  RSA keys, which do not have this restriction and can range from 512 bits in length to 4096 bits in length. A longer key length provides better taste, but takes longer to serve.  Shorter keys aren’t as good, but you can serve it quickly.

Now add the finishing touches to your Titan server, and then you are ready to serve your guests.

Before your guests can experience your server, they must use a password or a host key.  You’ll have to add the final component to the server to make this easier for your guests.

We recommend you support both Password Authentication and Public Key Authentication (meaning that client can use either Password OR Public Key Authentication), then select the Allow Trusted Host Keys option and deselect the Require Trusted Host Keys option, but depending on your taste, select what you like.

Before serving your guests, navigate to the guest’s public key filename and click.

* Note that the client host key pair will be created by each individual client.

They will then need to export their Public Host Key in SSH2 or OpenSSH format and send that .pub file to the Titan Administrator so that it can be imported into the Titan Host Key Database.

Make sure your server is started prior to serving.  Enjoy!

Got Mac?

Hey all you MAC users. How would you like to easily access and transfer files over your FTP, SFTP, FTPS or WebDAV Servers? What would you say if I told you you could effortlessly mount a drive to connect to one or all of these servers? Well, now you can with WebDrive for MAC v2.0.

Unlike a typical FTP client, WebDrive allows you to open and edit server-based files without the additional step of downloading the file. Using the simple WebDrive site profile manager, you can configure WebDrive to mount a remote FTP server as a local file system device. By connecting through a ‘virtual’ device, there is no need to learn a separate FTP client interface. You access and edit files on the server the same way that you interact with files on your local Mac.

For more informaton visit us online at: http://www.southrivertech.com/products/webdrive/mac/index.html.

Or email us at:  sales@southrivertech.com

Simplifying the Installation of a Multi-seat WebDrive License

A little known feature of WebDrive, is that it can be easily set up for installation on multiple computers using the same configuration settings.  South River Technologies has developed a quick start guide to assist in large scale deployment of WebDrive. The guide is found on the support section of our website with many other technical articles and whitepapers.

By ‘large scale’, we include installations from 10 to 10,000 or more desktops. Using the procedures and instructions in this guide, you will be able to:

• Create an initialization file; in the form of a Windows registry file, or a text based ‘ini’ file
• Assign the registration code
• Automatically activate the software
• Pre-configure your server connection database
• Turn off the ‘check for update’ feature
• Enable or disable various elements of the user interface.

Another feature of WebDrive, one that will appeal to system administrators, is the ability to update an existing installation without reinstalling the product. This is accomplished by creating a registry file that is automatically imported on a subsequent execution of WebDrive. One usage of this feature would be to add another server site definition to all the PCs using a WebDrive 50 seat license. This would be very useful in the case where a company added a second off-site SFTP file backup server for employees to save their work in progress files.

There are dozens of additional elements that can be pre-configured. Check out the Best Practices Guide for Large Scale Deployment to see if any of them will help you with your installation.

Add a comment to this post to share some of the ways that you use this feature, or suggest additional items for pre-configuration and assistance with multi-seat installation.

Shush! It’s a Secret. The FTP Client WebDrive is on Sale!

South River Technologies, developer of WebDrive universal drive mapping client, is having a very special private sale this week.

For THREE DAYS ONLY,
Tuesday, August 18 through Thursday, August 20,
SRT will be offering our WebDrive Individual license for just $30.00 US.
That’s half off the regular price!

This sale will last for 3 days and will not be extended. Are you happy with WebDrive? Do your co-workers and friends know about it? This is the perfect opportunity to share your success with them and get them using WebDrive at a never before seen price.

Visit our purchase page http://www.southrivertech.com/purchase/wdpricing.html during the sale and use the WebDrive Coupon Code WD-BLOG-50,  to purchase your discounted WebDrive licenses. Buy one, buy two, buy 10 – share them with all your co-workers.

Okay, so we don’t really want to you to keep this a secret. Tell everyone. Tweet about it, share it on your Facebook page, link to this post in your blog. Spread the news to everyone, they will be so thankful.

WebDrive for Windows – Caching Explained

In order to provide quicker directory browsing and file editing, WebDrive caches both directory listings and files that are accessed on the server.

Some applications require that a file be cached on the local computer so that the application can access the file, for example, Word or MediaPlayer. Protocols like FTP and WebDAV do not provide for random file access, i.e., the capability to seek to a location within a file and read or write a small byte-range of data. However, Windows applications expect to be able to perform random access on a file. Therefore, when WebDrive receives a request from the file system to read a section of a file, it will download the entire file into the cache so that the Windows application will have full access to its contents.

One issue that can arise with caching is what happens if the file in the cache is out of date with what is on the server. Once a directory listing is cached by WebDrive, depending on your cache mode, you may not be able to see files in a folder that were uploaded by another user. Also, a file that was previously cached may be out of date if another user edited the file on the server. This is where the various caching modes of WebDrive can address these concerns.

Cache Modes

Single-User – In Single-User mode, WebDrive will act as if you are the only user accessing the server. This means that once a directory listing or file is cached, WebDrive will assume that the file is up to date. If a remote user uploads a new file to a folder on the server that was already cached by WebDrive, then the WebDrive user browsing the server in Explorer will not see the file unless they manually flush the cache. This cache mode provides the best performance and is the default mode selected after installation.

Multi-User – In Multi-User mode, WebDrive will “validate” files and listings that are cached with the server when they are accessed on the local system. This ensures that you are always seeing up-to-date directory listings and files. The drawback to this mode is that the validating process does take some time; however, it is fairly efficient, especially for SFTP and HTTP protocols. If you are using FTP, this cache mode can be problematic because most FTP servers do not have a way of reporting the modified time for a single file listing.

Custom – In Custom mode, you can fine-tune how and when files are validated with the server. The option Expire cached files after (X) seconds can be used when your server is unable to determine or report a files modified time. When this option is enabled, WebDrive will simply assume that after X seconds have passed, a cache file will be considered invalid and a new one will be downloaded from the server. This setting should only be used for FTP servers or special circumstances where determining the files modified time is not possible.

None – If you select None as your cache mode, files will always be downloaded from the server when accessed. A file in the cache will not be considered valid. When enabled, this mode is very slow and not recommended. In order to provide random access to applications, WebDrive must still cache files; however, once the application closes the file it will be marked invalid in the cache and downloaded again on the next access.

For more information on WebDrive caching and troubleshooting, see the WebDrive User’s Guide.

On The “Edge”

When inbound ports to networks are opened, private networks become vulnerable to malicious hacking attempts. When a hacker’s primary motivation is theft, that hacker will attempt to gain unauthorized access to a network, intent upon stealing and exploiting private and valuable information. Network intrusion attacks can seriously damage an organization’s reputation, and compromise assets and revenue. 

In order to protect  Titan servers, South River Technologies has written a product called DMZedge Server.  The DMZedge server resides outside the firewall. The  Titan and GroupDrive servers call out to the DMZedge server by opening an outbound port, preventing unauthorized client requests. Client requests are satisfied by a response on the outbound port; no inbound ports are ever opened. No unauthorized requests can gain access to valuable information and resources that exist on the private network.  Access to Titan and GroupDrive servers is securely extended beyond the local LAN with minimal firewall configuration/administration.  You can take an “out of the box” stateful firewall with DENY ALL as the incoming firewall rule, put up a DMZedge server and still have an Internet facing, remotely accessible Titan and/or GroupDrive server.

DMZedge will act as an authentication proxy for internal servers.  If your users authenticate against Active Directory or LDAP, or even Native GroupDrive or Titan authentication, that capability is extended via the Edge server to external networks.  The authentication database is never stored on, or replicated to, the DMZedge server.  It can also listen on all the Titan/GroupDrive supported secure protocols – FTPS, SFTP, HTTPS, and WebDAV over SSL.   It supports multiple server environments as well as server clustering. 

One could explain DMZedge as being both bouncer and doorman – stopping unwanted visitors while allowing residents to enter.  The reality is that it’s a fast, simple way to secure access to internal servers while leveraging existing authentication and data access policies.

Top 10 Reasons to Use the E-mail Tab in Titan FTP/MFT Server

10.  You can configure it to send  an e-mail every time someone types in a bad password.

9.    You can find out who uploaded the “Thriller” video to the Finance FTP server.

8.    You can finally give the Cleveland office proof that typing:  WHEREISIT is not a valid FTP command.

7.    You can see how many times a day the user: Root tries to hack into your server.  

6.    You can see how much space the Art Department really uses on the server.

5.     Get a message that Joe changed his password.

4.     Discover who renamed a file on the Accounting server to: nomoremoney.xls

3.     Instead of waiting for the Help Desk to ring, you can find out the FTP server is down.

2.    You can find out who deleted the “Thriller” video before you got to watch it.

And the Number #1 Reason:

You can find out if your FTP server is being hammered and hindering your legit users from accessing the server!

How to Configure E-mail:

 The Email Server tab is used to configure mail server settings used by Titan.

To access the Email Server tab, click the server in the tree pane and then click the Email Server tab.

 SMTP Server IP or Hostname – Type the IP address or host name of the SMTP server used for sending email.

 Mail Server Username– Type a valid Username that will be used for authentication to the remote SMTP server.

 Mail Server Password – Type a corresponding Password for the username.

 Test Connection – Click Test Connection to test the connection settings to the SMTP server. If Titan is unable to connect to the server, or unable to authenticate to the server using your credentials, an error will be displayed.

Get more information on the Titan FTP/MFT Server

PATCH IT!

A familiar icon appeared in my system tray a few hours ago and it got me thinking. Now that’s always dangerous, me thinking.

The icon was the “New updates are available” notification icon. So I started thinking about a conversation I had over the weekend with a new friend of mine, Sean. Sean is an avid Macintosh user. I am not. In the many conversations I have had with avid Macintosh users, the common theme seems to be that a Mac is largely flawless and invulnerable to attack whereas Windows computers are always being attacked because they are horribly vulnerable because of security holes. My personal experience with Windows over the last twenty years is quite the opposite, I have never (knocking on wood here) had a virus or trojan or spyware on any of my Windows based computers. And I have owned or used several dozen such computers over that span and for the last fifteen years they’ve all had constant connections to the Internet.

I thought I should check on the situation from a neutral party. I found a paper from the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology titled “0-Day Patch – Exposing Vendors (In)security Performance.”  In the paper the writers compare the speed of response to published vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Macintosh operating systems. The concept of a “zero day” patch is that the company releases the patch for a vulnerability on the same day it is publicly disclosed. I was surprised by two things: it turns out that Macs and Windows PCs have had about the same number of high and medium vulnerabilities over the study period from January 2002 to December 2007, with Macs having 738 to Windows’ 658; and Microsoft has been much better at releasing 0-day patches over that period with over a 60% average rate of 0-day patches vs Apple’s under 40% average.

Patches are an important feature of any software package and they are often critical in operating systems. At South River Technologies we recently began using our own Windows Server Update Services server to better manage how and when updates are installed. And all of our software packages also have a “Check for Updates” feature. Our new Webdrive for Mac, which is currently in beta testing, also has this feature. I’m amazed when one of our support engineers tells me that a customer is using version 6 of Webdrive (the current one is 9.0) or version 5 of Titan FTP (the current one is 7.11). Like most software companies, we don’t provide support for older versions of the software. The reason is that it can’t be patched. So if you’re using software: PATCH IT!

WebDAV vs. FTP

In many conversations with our customers, I often run into a common question:  “What’s the difference between WebDAV and FTP?”  There seems to be confusion about the differences between the two protocols.  Since SRT’s products support both WebDAV and FTP, I thought it would be a good topic to cover in this week’s blog.

Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), by definition, is a set of extensions to the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), which allows users to edit and manage files collaboratively on remote Web servers.  One of the major features in WebDAV is the ability to lock files automatically to prevent data being overwritten by another user.  WebDAV also supports XML properties so users can access data about the file, the author, the date the file was modified and namespace manipulation, which allows resources to be copied or moved.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a simple network protocol based on IP, which allows users to transfer files between computers on the Internet.  FTP service is based on a client/server architecture.  An FTP client program initiates a connection to a remote computer running FTP server software.   Once a connection is established, the client can send and receive copies of files.  To connect to an FTP server, the client typically requires a username and password.  There are also public FTP archives that follow a special convention that accepts a username of “anonymous”.

There are several file transfer protocols available:

FTP – the plain FTP protocol, which has been around since the 1970’s.  It usually runs over TCP port 21, and is not secure.

FTPS – which stands for FTP over TLS/SSL.  It is often called Secure FTP and runs over TCP port 21 or 990.

SFTP – another file transfer protocol that has nothing to do with FTP.  The acronym stands for SSH File Transfer Protocol.  SFTP runs over an SSH session, usually on TCP port 22.  The protocol has been around since the 1990’s.

The FTP protocol supports two modes of data transfer, plain text and binary, and usually defaults to plain text.  Unlike the WebDAV protocol, FTP does not support automatic file locking, which can lead to users accessing the same file and potentially overwriting changes made to that file by the initial user.

SRT’s WebDrive , often used as an FTP client, supports a variety of protocols.  WebDrive can be used as a WebDAV Client to map a drive letter to WebDAV servers, including Sharepoint.  WebDrive also supports SFTP and Amazon S3.   WebDrive is now available as a Mac OSX FTP, SFTP and WebDAV Client.

SRT’s Titan Editions support FTP, SFTP, and FTPS.