Monthly Archives: June 2015

Proper FTP setup via IIS using Passive FTP

Since PASSIVE FTP seems to be a relative standard (that I experience), and since most clients don’t understand or want to use “ACTIVE” FTP, here is the easy way to configure your firewall and FTP software on an IIS machine to permit PASSIVE FTP.

Firewall Setup

You’ll need two rules and one “one to one” NAT mapping (this may vary a bit due to your firewall software).

The one to one NAT mapping needs to map the external IP address to the internal IP of the server.  Such as “66.33.123.21” mapped to “10.1.1.21”

One rule to allow the world into TCP port 21, mapped to the specific server in question.  (Allow * from ANY to 10.1.1.21 TCP port 21).

Second rule, specifically for PASSIVE FTP.  Allow * from ANY to 10.1.1.21 on ports range 50000 to 50100.

FTP Server Setup

We normally use Filezilla Server (latest version, of course).

Add a user and setup the standard settings.

Passive settings are as follows (below).

Most importantly, the “X.X.X.X” area below is your PUBLIC IP that is mapped through your firewall.

Click OK and save the settings.

FTP1

 

FTP Client Settings

Nothing fancy here, just check to make sure the settings look like this:

FTP2

Throttling bandwidth on an IIS based site

If you need to throttle (or limit) the amount of bandwidth a specific site on Microsoft Server — this is for you.  This should work with any Microsoft Server OS from 2008 to present. Open IIS. Go to the specific site in question (in the tree to left expand and click on the specific site name).

on the right side panel, click Configure — Limits.

Check “limit bandwidth usage” and type in a number.

Click OK.

limits

WordPress and Google Fonts HTTP and HTTPS error messages and resolutions…

If you are trying to deal with the dreaded insecure messages when trying to use Google Fonts on WordPress based sites, here are a few things to try. Within the specific theme folder you are using, edit the functions.php file. You want to examine the file and search/look for “googleapis”.  That should help you find the correct area of the code. In my example site (below), notice how the url is referenced as “//fonts.googleapis.com” and not as “http://fonts…”.

Make sure your theme is using just “//fonts.googleapis…” and is not hard coded to HTTP or HTTPS

// Retrieve Font URL to register default Google Fonts
function courage_google_fonts_url() {
    
 $font_families = array('Lato', 'Fjalla One');
 $query_args = array(
  'family' => urlencode( implode( '|', $font_families ) ),
  'subset' => urlencode( 'latin,latin-ext' ),
 );
 $fonts_url = add_query_arg( $query_args, '//fonts.googleapis.com/css' );
    return apply_filters( 'courage_google_fonts_url', $fonts_url );
}

 

If you make these changes and this does not help, or if you cannot locate similar code in the functions file – and you’re still getting the SSL warning messages on your site, then you’re probably at the mercy of a specific plugin, or issue with your particular theme.

Try shifting the site to a basic theme like 2015 (for a few minutes for testing…) and see if the site works fine in http/https modes with the google fonts.  If it DOES, then the issue is your theme.  Contact the theme developer or look hard through the theme code and determine where the googleapis call is.

If the theme does not seem to be the issue, then it’s probably a plugin that’s causing your issues.  If you feel brave, disable the plugins and start testing one after another to try and localize which plugin is causing the issue.  (Disable all of them. Test the site.  See if the fonts work without issue.  Enable one plugin.  Test again, enable another plugin, more testing, etc.)

Hope that helps a bit!