IIS6 server not allowing ncftpget to download files recursivelly

Question

I'm working on an old Windows 2003 server with IIS 6.0. There's currently an FTP site in production on that server and I had a need to add another one which I did using a virtual directory. I can manually login, navigate several directories deep and download files one at a time without any errors thrown. However, when I try to download recursively it's only grabbing the files and folders in the root of the remote directory I specify. I have this same directory structure running on another Windows 2003 server and I have no problems downloading everything recursively using the same batch script so I'm sure the issue is not with that. I'm just at a complete loss as to what to even look into next. I have verified that the user I'm logging in has windows rights to the entire directory structure, I even enabled anonymous access and set the IUSR account to have full control on the entire directory tree as well, no luck.

I should also mention that there are no error messages returned either. I have also looked at the log file on the server and no errors shown there either, just the record of each file and folder it actually downloads, no reference to the ones its skipping. The client I'm using to download is ncftpget if anyone is curious. I'm using this in an application so the client cannot be changed, this same client is being used on another server with the same parameters without issue.

Answer 1

IIS supports two different formats of directory listing. MS-DOS and UNIX. Maybe that's the difference. The ncftpget may have problems with the MS-DOS format. Make sure, you have UNIX format selected.

In your site panel go to FTP > FTP Directory Browsing > Directory Listing Style > UNIX :

Answer 2

Wasn't able to get ncftpget to download recursively, despite having no issues with it on another server with the same configuration. It ended up being faster to just rewrite the code to use wget instead for the recursive download.