Use a web FTP client to access files from an iPhone

Nov 24, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I keep a number of reference documents on a server at work that would be very handy to have access to on my iPhone while at work. The server is Windows 2003, and the iPhone does not provide an easy way to access shared files by ftp or smb. I was thinking about using something like AirSharing, but the files are changing and edited by more than one person, making sync a bit of an issue.

I thought about enabling IIS directory browsing, but this proved too limiting. Eventually, I came across a (free) project called net2FTP, which is a web-based FTP client. Using net2ftp requires that you can host FTP on your file server, and a webserver with PHP (either on the same server, or somewhere else). I installed Filezilla and net2FTP on the server, set up the FTP server to share out the directories I needed, and made some adjustments to net2FTP. net2ftp even includes a "mobile" skin (which you can set as the default) to work better with the iPhone.

Now the directories are password protected, and I can browse them from the iPhone, loading PDFs, excel, or whatever else the iPhone can read. I locked net2ftp so it would only access the local server, and only accept connections from our internal network (since I'm using the iphone over wifi in the office) to make it more secure.

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