Lunatik's questions

I have two Filezilla server instances on different WAN connections, both mapping to the same /test directory on the file server.

To validate that clients have connectivity I have a read/list only test account (e.g. test) with a simple password that can be given verbally over the phone (e.g. pass). This saves a lot of hassle when on-boarding new clients, or debugging routing problems.

I have tended to disable the test account when not required, but this is somewhat of an inconvenience as it requires logging on to the server and can be required multiple times per week.

What, if any, risks would I be taking if I left the test account enabled with a weak or easy to guess password? Are there any known exploits that could be used to access or deny access to the server?

Note: The server is set to autoban IP addresses for 2 hours after 10 failed login attempts. Syslog monitoring on the firewall is also set to flag suspicious activity. This could be extended to banning naughty IPs at the perimeter.

EDIT: I mentioned FTP for expediency but the servers are actually set to require FTPS with unencrypted FTP disallowed.

I have a Windows Server 2003 machine with dual NICs. Until now we've only had a single ISP provisioned by our landlord in the building and have only been using one NIC. Filezilla is the FTP server.

We've had a long standing issue with a client who needs to use a very specific VPN setup provided by an ancient Cisco router. Trouble was this router refused to co-exist with some other clients' VPN settings, meaning we frequently had to swap cables to bring the old VPN in and out of action.

This, as you can imagine, got very old.

We've got a new ISP which is dedicated for us and the plan is to leave the Cisco VPN running on the old ISP and move all other clients over to the new connection. The thinking being we would run the office network on a separate subnet off NIC 1 and leave only the Cisco VPN connected to NIC 2. Running two instances of Filezilla binding to specific NICs should allow FTP to be provisioned on both internet connections.

This all works fine and both FTP servers are accessible from the internet...providing only one is active at a time. As soon as one is connected the other server can't be reached.

I can see how the server might have trouble routing to two external connections, deciding which gateway to use and what not, but I'm pretty much at my knowledge limit about such things so don't know where to turn next.

Do I have to look at defining routing within Windows (RIP?) so that it can route to both gateways simultaneously?

I wish to use a 2010 vintage quad core Xeon server to periodically encrypt 500GB eSATA drives. I have three questions:

1) I assume the current version of WDE is fully multi-threaded and throughput scales roughly linearly with the number of cores?

2) Am I able to restrict the number of cores utilised by the WDE process so as not to impact other work on the server?

3) Roughly how long should I expect each encryption to take?

There seems to be conflicting information around on the threading of WDE, even on the PGP KB site where I also asked this question (it is nearly dead there though) as a lot of older answers indicate that it is not offered.