CrossFTP Pro and Amazon CloudFront Distribution

Amazon recently announced CloudFront service, its version of reliable and cost efficient Content Delivery Network that is seamlessly integrated with Amazon S3. It makes it easier for you to distribute content to end users quickly, with low latency and high data transfer speeds. Amazon CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of edge locations. End users are routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

To create CloudFront Distribution in CrossFTP Pro, you have to select one Bucket, or inside one Bucket, and choose Manage CloudFront Distributions in the context menu, as shown in the following figure.


A new List Distribution dialog will be shown. You can create new Distributions, or Edit the existing ones in this dialog. A Distribution dialog will be popped up if you create or edit a distribution. In this new dialog, you should Enable the Amazon Distribution, and optionally fill in the comments as well as a list of CNAMEs. Once you've made the modification, click OK to take effect, and the List Distribution dialog will be refreshed accordingly. Keep in mind that Status field will be “In Progress” while Amazon copies your files to the edge servers and turn to “Deployed” when done.



You can temporarily disable a distribution by clearing out “Enable Amazon CloudFront Distribution” checkbox. To delete a distribution, you need to disable the distribution first, and then select delete to remove the distribution.

We hope you will find our post useful and will enjoy the easiness of CrossFTP Pro. As always we appreciate your feedback as it helps to make the product better!

CrossFTP and Amazon S3 Service

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an online on-demand data storage service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon's S3 provides a simple web server to access any file that is stored in their storage cloud. This means, you can access files stored at S3, or directly via a web browser, if you have set the permissions as "read" for all users.

To get an Amazon S3 account:

1. Open page sign up for amazon s3 and locate a Sign Up button towards right side of this page. Click the button and follow instructions.
2. After success registration, you will find Access key and Secret key at Your Account -> Security Credentials. Your access key is visible but your secret key, which serves as a password, is hidden within "show" label. You need these two keys to start working with Amazon S3 Services. 

To Connect to Amazon S3 in CrossFTP:

1. Create a new site in CrossFTP, and choose Protocol as S3/HTTPS
   
2. Fill in the Access Key and Secret field. Press connect to connect to the S3 site. Your Access key and Secret key can also be found at this page.
3. [opt-in region only] Regional endpoint should be used for opt-in S3 regions for the Host field. See S3 endpoint table (link) for the regional endpoint for details.
   

How to Create Bucket in CrossFTP?
Bucket : Each of the files and folders stored in Amazon S3 is contained in a bucket. It's like "top level folder" or "top level drive". Bucket names are globally unique. If you want to use these buckets for web hosting, try to choose a bucket name, which is a valid host name and everything should be lower case:

Valid Name : bucket2008, 1bucket, 01_bucket, 01.bucket, www.example.com
Invalid Name :_bucket, .bucket, -bucket, 01-.bucket,01.-bucket, 127.0.0.1

To create a bucket in CrossFTP, just go to the root folder \, and choose Create a new Folder. You will be allowed to choose whether your bucket's location is in US or EU, which means to a unites state's bucket, or Europe's bucket. Press OK to finish the bucket creation.

How to transfer files from/to Amazon S3?
Just like the traditional FTP file transfer, you can just Drag & Drop the files from/to your S3 site. Multiple tabs, multiple threads, queue modifications, directory synchronizations, etc are naturally supported for the S3 transfer as well.

How to grant proper ACL for IAM account to list buckets and files

Here is a sample ACL setting for IAM account's AWS managed policies:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "AWS": "iam-user-arn"
            },
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:GetObjectVersion",
                "s3:ListBucket"
            ],
            "Resource": "bucket-arn"
        }
    ]
}

Backup files in Glacier/Deep Archive Storage

To make cost effective backup and restore of files through Glacier/Deep Archive storage, check this page.

Conclusion

We hope you will find our post useful and will enjoy the easiness of CrossFTP Pro. As always we appreciate your feedback as it helps to make the product better!

Edit Remote Files in CrossFTP

Edit the files in the remote FTP site can be as simple as one click in CrossFTP. You can press the edit button, or shortcut F3 to edit the selected file, as shown in the above figure. You can also modify your preferred editor to meet your requirement. Just choose Tools -> Global Options -> Operations, as shown in the above figure.

If you want to open certain types of files with specific editor, for example, htm file by dreamweaver, and txt file by notebook, you can further specify the openning program for each type of file. To do this, just choose your file, open the context menu in the file pane, and select Edit/Open with -> Choose Program. After setting up your preferred program, you can reuse it in future.

We hope you will find our post useful and will enjoy the easiness of CrossFTP Pro. As always we appreciate your feedback as it helps to make the product better!

CrossFTP 1.51 Released

CrossFTP is an excellent FTP client. CrossFTP Pro is a FTP client supporting SFTP, FXP, WebDav, and Amazon S3.

CrossFTP 1.51 is a major enhancement release. It starts to support FTP Web URL and preview in browser, advanced log management utility, Web CrossFTP Pro's customization, archive files and directories, Amazon CloudFront distribution management, S3 signed URL, S3 object head display. It also fixes a lot of known issues in the FXP transfer, SFTP link file support, and further improves the stability of the file transfer engine.

Home page: http://www.crossftp.com

CrossFTP Server 1.12 Released

CrossFTP Server is a user-friendly, professional FTP Server for multiple platforms. It offers a high-performance, easy configurable, and most of all a secure enabled FTP server. It provides a versatile GUI for the novice users' start-up, and the advanced users' configuration as well.

CrossFTP Server 1.12 is a bug fixes release. It fixes the configure dialog's display problem, and the tray icon suspension in the Mac OS X system.

Home page: http://www.crossftp.com/crossftpserver.htm

Fast filter and search the file in list

Search and find a file in the file list is a common task for heavy FTP users. Sometimes when you need to fastly locate the file, it is often a headache for your eye. However, CrossFTP makes this very simple. It provides a fast way to do this by using a filter box in the right bottom corner. You can also press / on your keyboard to go to this fast filter box. Take the above Figure as an example, by filling in the file name in the filter box, the Linux's kernel files are dynamically filtered and displayed in the directory pane.

We hope you will find our post useful and will enjoy the easiness of CrossFTP Pro. As always we appreciate your feedback as it helps to make the product better!

Manage FTP sites by FTP command

FTP commands provide a useful way to manage your FTP site remotely. Some FTP servers support a rich set of FTP commands to manage the users, groups, quotas, and so on.

CrossFTP Pro offers powerful command line tool to easily manage your multiple FTP servers. To open the command line tool, choose View -> Command Line, and you will see the command line tool to appear below the FTP files panel. To submit a command to the FTP server, just enter your command, and presee ENTER.

CrossFTP Pro predefines a number of FTP commands for several famous FTP servers. The predefined command set in CrossFTP Pro contains glFTPd, glFTPd admin, RaidenFTPD, ioFTPD, Serv-U and DrFTPD. They are defined in the file ~/.crossftp/ftpcmd.xml (on windows is C:\Documents and Settings\username\.crossftp\ftpcmd.xml). You can also modify this configuration file to add your preferred command set.

CrossFTP Pro also support to manage a number of FTP sites simultaneously. You should already know that CrossFTP is a multi-tabbed FTP client. If you have a list of similar FTP sites, and have already opened them in the CrossFTP's tabs, you can submit the FTP command to these sites simultaneously without reentering the command many times. To do this, just choose "Sumbit to All Tabs" in the popup menu, as shown in the picture, and then input the command and press ENTER. That's it, very easy, right?

Any commands or suggestions on the command tools are welcome!

How to change the files' default Mime types for Amazon S3 in CrossFTP?

Each file in Amazon S3 is associated with Mime types. The file's mime type will be sent to the client when the file is downloaded. The mime type is important for the end users since normally the client will decide how to process the file according to its mime type.

The good news is that, it is relatively simple to change the files' default mime types for Amazon S3 in CrossFTP client. You can use any of your favorite text editor, and edit the file named mime.types to change it, which contains all files' default mime information in CrossFTP. You can find the mime.types file at:

• In windows: (if you install your windows in c drive) C:/Documents and Settings/USER_NAME/.crossftp/mime.types, where USER_NAME is your system's login name.
• In *nix: ~/.crossftp/mime.types

After modifying the mime.types, restart CrossFTP, and all the changes will take effect.

We hope you will find our post useful and will enjoy the easiness of CrossFTP Pro. As always we appreciate your feedback as it helps to make the product better!