My virtual lab

This article has two purposes. It is the second part of the Mikrotik IPSec series and, at the same time, a short virtualization guide. I will present how we can simulate most common scenarios them in virtual environment.

Although I am using Oracle VirtualBox (referred to as VBox from here on out) for these demonstrations, you can use any other virtualization solution in a very similar way. We don’t need any special features of the virtualization solution. You should only optimize your VMs based on the settings related to your environment. You can find my guides about VBox environment here and here.

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Installing FileZilla FTP server on a Windows Server Core

FileZilla FTP server is a very popular open-source solution. We can use it either as a desktop side solution or as a full server side solution. The desktop side solution is useful for a small installations. However, when we need a larger amount of the traffic or to server more users, the server side solution is only reasonable choice.

In addition, the entire process of data exchange via FTP protocol does not require any server-side visualization. The whole process of graphic representation of available data is carried out on the client side. Therefore, we do not need the GUI on the server side.

Now we have the solution – the FileZilla FTP server running on the Windows Server Core.

Making portable FileZilla FTP server

Whether you’re Systems Engineer, test engineer, programmer/developer and when you need to have FTP server software with you at any time, the right answer will be a portable software packet. Unfortunately, not every software packet has a portable version. In such case you can either search for some other software or to try to make it portable.

FileZilla FTP server is a widely used FTP solutions on the Windows platform. This is open source software and you can download both server and client versions for free. Although free, this server is a feature rich and easy to administer. And we can use it from the USB flash drive.

Duplicated FTP server services on same machine

Recently I had call from customer with very interesting problem. They reported that they can’t connect to dedicated FTP server, either from LAN or from Internet.

This was very strange, as this server working for years without problem. At first, I suggested customer to check Internet link, router and similar settings. When they called me back, I recognized that I must to try myself. Now this sounds like anomaly.