At work there's a FTP server with static IP for clients downloading contents. However, this is the same box as the web server (IIS6) and we want to relocate the FTP to a linux based standalone FTP server.
They are all VMs and we haven't decided what to use for the FTP server, perhaps FileZilla on Ubuntu or Openfiler.
No matter how we do it, the new FTP server will have a new IP address, and that's the problem, as we will notify all FTP users about our change of IP but the respond time from individuals varies as a matter of fact.
Can we have some sort of IP redirection in place to solve the problem? For temporary or for long.
Or, what are the best practices for this given situation, say if we get to re-organise the server infrastructure.
Any help appreciated. TIA
I would say your best bet is to put in a DNS alias. This means you can give out the address ftp.yourdomain.com and people connect directly to that. You can point the alias at whatever server you want, new one, current one, old one, temp one etc and the external people will all only ever need to connect to the alias.
It won't help you with notifying people of the change of address, but it does mean you will have to do it once.
With regards to redirecting an IP, that might be dificult if you have other stuff on that box. You may, depending on what firewalls you have, be able to write a rule that says "All incoming traffic on FTP (port 21) should redirect to new server IP", but I am not sure if you can do that with your firewall.