I dis­cov­ered a SIMPLE and EFFECTIVE way to con­nect to our web servers the other day and I almost feel a lit­tle dumb for not dis­cov­er­ing it ear­lier. Per­haps this is even avail­able in Win­dows and I’ve never noticed…

Some­time ago when I upgraded to the BETA ver­sion of Ubuntu 9.10 my FTP client stopped work­ing. For what­ever rea­son it would trans­fer a few files then sud­denly freeze up. I would close my FTP client and try it again only to expe­ri­ence the same result. I deduced this issue was a Ubuntu 9.10 issue as I would have sim­i­lar results with sev­eral dif­fer­ent FTP clients.

Then one day, when I needed to con­nect to a dif­fer­ent file server in the office I noticed in the “Con­nect to Server” screen the option to con­nect to a pri­vate FTP… Well, I used it to con­nect to one of our web servers and it con­nected flawlessly.

Best of all, it mounts the FTP server as if it was a local folder, open­ing the same type of win­dow you would nor­mally use to drag and drop files across win­dows. You can open files directly from the server and save them directly to the server.

If you’re con­nect­ing to an FTP server you reg­u­larly use you can book­mark the server allow­ing the ftp address, user name, and pass­word to be saved so that it can mount the server with a sin­gle click.