The Advanced tab becomes available when Settings is selected for a Domain. When selected the Settings Menu appears in the menu bar. This tab allows you to modify the following advanced Domain options:
Serv-U normally reads account settings only once from the domain storage source (INI file, registry, or ODBC database) and then stores the values internally to speed up subsequent access. This is generally a good thing, since access to a file or database is many orders of magnitude slower than accessing an internal table. However, if you want to update accounts outside of Serv-U, for example in case of ODBC storage by directly updating the database records, the server will not know about those changes until the cache time-to-live expires for the account. Lowering the time-to-live value means Serv-U will pick up changes quicker, but it will also mean more overhead. Setting time-to-live to a higher value means less overhead, but external changes will not be noted as quickly by the server.
Serv-U uses a one-way secure hash function to encrypt passwords, named salted-MD5. Passwords are stored in the ServUDaemon.ini file or in the registry and enabling this option ensures no one can read or recover the passwords. Once the passwords are encrypted they can never be decrypted again. This is literal, password encryption is much like a sausage machine where a pig goes into one end and the sausage comes out the other, cranking the other direction will not get back the pig from the sausage. When this check box is unchecked passwords are stored as clear text and they are visible in the user account setup. By default passwords are stored encrypted.
Changing this option will cause all existing passwords to become invalid and they will have to be entered again in the user account setup.
When selected this allows users with write privileges to change the date and time of an uploaded file using the MDTM command. FTP Voyager supports this option automatically with Serv-U servers. For more information about FTP Voyager visit http://www.ftpvoyager.com/.
Select this option to ignore the MDTM command if the date and time is in the future. Be careful, however, some clients may be in a different time zone, and the date and time may actually be valid if in the future.
Select this option if passive mode data transfers should be allowed by the server.
Here you can specify an IP address to use for passive mode transfers. This becomes important when the FTP server is behind a firewall or proxy server that shields the server from the outside Internet address. Instead, the server only sees the local LAN address and would normally report this back to the FTP client when it requests a passive mode data transfer. The client needs to know the Internet IP address though, not the LAN IP address. Setting the Internet IP address in this field solves the problem.
Note:
If you have a dynamic IP address Serv-U can automatically update your passive mode IP address for you. In order for this to work you must enable dynamic DNS and enter a valid symbolic IP name on the Dynamic DNS tab, passive mode transfers have to be allowed, and the "use IP" field on this tab has to be left blank.
Enabling this option tells Serv-U to look for special character sequences in commands send to the server, as used by some Web browsers to encode URLs. An example of this is ‘%20’, which represents the ‘space’ character. These character sequences are then converted back to their regular character (ASCII) form. Enable this option if you are having problems with spaces in file or path names when accessing the server through a Web browser.
The FTP standard require that the NLST (=Name LiST) command only return file names to the FTP client, and nothing else. However, traditionally many servers, including Serv-U, used to return a full listing including directories and there are FTP clients that rely on this. Checking this option means the server sends directories as well as files when the client issues an NLST command. Note that enabling this option violates the FTP standard.
Enable this option to have Serv-U automatically try to create a user’s home directory if it does not exist. This option is useful for new accounts, where the home directory has not been made manually by the system administrator, as well as in cases where the user accidentally deletes his home directory.