How to Fix Unreliable FTP

Question

One of my clients has a long-standing problem with his FTP connection to a website hosted by Verizon. The website has hundreds of static product pages. Periodically, we refresh the site by pushing new pages up to it. We have tried a number of ways to automate it, but the batch always ends up freezing before it finishes.

Filezilla seems to work well, but so far we have only been able to figure out how to send files up manually. Is there a way to automate FileZilla with scripts, or do I need to get the source and hack it? Or maybe you have heard of this problem and know what the simple solution is?

Answer 1

You can use WinSCP to perform this kind of automatic upload. It's normally used with SFTP or SCP but it supports plain FTP as well (your server may actually be capable of SFTP or SCP).

WinSCP Automation Guide

You would then add a Windows Scheduled Task to run WinSCP with the script as a command-line argument.

Answer 2

I did find with a certain ftps transfer that oddball differences in FTPs protocol did make the client act funny, not finishing transfers and so on. The best we could get was to swap to curl.

Answer 3

You may also wish to check out Tunnelier:

http://www.bitvise.com/tunnelier.html

It also does SFTP, SSH, port forwarding, etc.