Self deleting files with IIS4 and War FTP daemon

Richard Davey ( (no email) )
Mon, 20 Jul 1998 17:22:47 +0100

Hi there,

We've got a very very strange problem with one of our NT servers. We are
running IIS4 and have around 50 or so web sites on it. We use War FTP daemon
to let the users upload their files.

Recently (as of the past couple of days) people have been reporting that
they are unable to overwrite existing files that are on the server. Their
FTP clients are giving them access denied messages. When we looked at the
files via Explorer (logged in as Admin on the NT Server) we were unable to
open, rename, copy, move or delete the files. Each one gave an Access Denied
error message. What's more, Disk Administrator showed no files as being
locked or in use and Event Viewer showed nothing strange.

We shut down the server and rebooted it. The files vanished. They'd
literally be deleted from the hard drive with no intervention on our part.

We played for hours and hours.. the end result being this.. if IIS has a
file locked open (i.e. someone had viewed the web page and the browser was
still on that site) and at the same time, the author uploaded a replacement
file, it trashed it. It's as if IIS has a lock on the directory and the FTP
software can't override or use it.

When the web browser was closed down and we knew there was nothing accessing
that site via IIS, the ftp worked perfectly.

Does anyone have ANY ideas at all as to what the hell is going on here? I'm
quite sure this used to work perfectly before in the past, but now we're
being locked out of files on our own server and users are getting a little
upset. Maybe ditch War FTP Daemon and install the new 1.70 version? Maybe
ditch IIS and use Apache instead?! This is really strange, any opinions are
much appreciated. Could it be a disk failure? CHKDSK was reporting strange
things, but nothing it didn't fix. Maybe a virus? although we don't install
any software on the server at all.

Cheers,

Richard Davey
Kaliba Systems Ltd.