6.1 Background

Anybody with experience in Web design knows that in order to put the site "live," the Web page files need to be sent to a Web server provided by your hosting company or ISP. Most people never get to see the physical machine that their Web site is hosted on, and their only contact with it is through a file transfer protocol, or FTP, program such as cuteFTP or smartFTP.

FTP is the most common cross-platform file transfer mechanism between computers over the Internet. FTP software is freely available for all major operating systems, including Windows, UNIX, and Mac OS X. This cross-platform interoperability is very important for Web site development because most Web designers work on Windows and most Web servers run from UNIX, Linux, and Netware OS.

FTP as defined in RFC 1350 supersedes an older protocol known as trivial file transfer protocol (TFTP). This system is very seldom used on the Internet, but it can be used for procedures such as diskless booting on a network. It has no authentication facilities.

6.2 Microsoft File Sharing

A competing technology developed by Microsoft is the Common Internet File (CIF) system. This is the native file-sharing protocol of Windows 2000 and XP. It is an extension of the earlier server message block (SMB) protocol used in prior versions of Windows. It is used to provide for the network drive functionality and print sharing. It is more secure than FTP, because of NTLM encryption, and generally faster; however, non-Windows...