CompleteFTP 4.0 has now been released, and has added some significant new features (mainly in the Professional Edition).

Disk and bandwidth quotas mean that administrators have more control over users’ use of resources. Quotas are set on an individual user basis.

Extensive real-time charts for performance monitoring have been added, so that a variety of statistics can be displayed, such as logins, uploads and downloads.

Event notification has been extended beyond email notification to include process triggers. This means that server processes can be launched when events such as uploading or downloading occur. For example, after uploading a DOS process might be used to copy a file, or perhaps to launch a process to parse the file and insert its contents in a database.

And finally, SSH terminal access has been added, so that a command-line terminal on the server can be accessed by any SSH client on any platform. This is a Unix-like shell that allows basic file operations to be performed, as well as the ability to execute processes on the server.

A trial download and more details can be obtained at this link.

CompleteFTP 3.3.0 has just been released, and has added some very useful features.

WinSCP is now supported for the SCP protocol. Most people would use WinSCP with the SFTP protocol, but for those wishing to use SCP only, CompleteFTP has not supported this mode until now. This is because WinSCP assumes a Unix shell is available, and sends a number of Unix commands to the server to provide directory navigation, creation and listing.

CompleteFTP nows supports the required Unix commands (even though it is a Windows server), and so WinSCP can now be used in SCP only mode.

Another important feature that has been added for 3.3.0 is auto-banning of IP addresses. It works by automatically banning IP addresses from connecting (for a period of time) if they have failed to authenticate a certain number of times within a time period.

For example, using the default settings, if a rogue client is attacking from a given IP address, and fails to guess a password correctly 10 times within a 60 second period, their IP address is banned from connecting for the next hour. After an hour has elapsed, the ban is automatically lifted. The auto-banning settings are configurable in the Professional Edition, although it is generally advisable to use the defaults.

Auto-banning significantly enhances the server security, preventing dictionary attacks that rapidly guess passwords in succession.

With the release of version 3.0, CompleteFTP has moved to a new level.

The Standard Edition continues to offer a fast, secure FTP/FTPS/SFTP server for the Windows platform.

The Professional Edition builds significantly on this with a number of new enterprise features. These include:

• support for SCP (secure copy)
• email notification for a variety of events such as file upload, download, delete
• Auditing (i.e. tracking all changes to files)
• Permission editing
• FTPS client certificate verification
• IP filtering (accept/reject connections based on IP address)

With these additional enhancements, CompleteFTP is now an extremely competitively priced and feature-rich solution for FTP/FTPS/SFTP/SCP support on the Windows platform.

A trial download and more details can be obtained at this link.