IMPORTANT! Changes for Publishing to Student Web Server
Starting in Spring of 2022 MSJC's I.T. department moved the Internet Authoring (IA) student Web server into a more secure environment, Amazon Web Services (AWS). This means that things have changed for how students access the IA student Web server when publishing and viewing their Web assignments. Students must now use the AWS Client VPN application to connect to the AWS virtual private network (VPN) first, before publishing or viewing Web assignments.
In addition, the integrated development environment (IDE) you use for publishing your Web assignments will need to be configured to use the FTPS protocol instead of FTP in order to be able to successfully publish assignment files and folders to the IA student Web server. View the AWS Client VPN tutorial first for instructions on downloading, installing, and configuring the AWS VPN. Then come back to this page to learn how to configure your IDE to use FTPS for publishing your assignments to the IA student Web server.
You MUST complete the AWS Client VPN step first before configuring your IDE for FTPS publishing.
Introduction
The hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) is used by Web browsers to communicate with Web servers, but how do Web developers copy their files to the Web server? The answer is the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). In Web development terminology the process of copying files from the Web developer's computer to a Web server is known as publishing. In order to successfully publish files to the Web server it is important that the Web developer know which version of FTP is supported by the Web server. It used be that we used plain old FTP for publishing files to our Web servers, but these days the need for increased security prevails and so a secure version of FTP is usually needed. Both FTPS (formally known as FTP over TLS/SSL) and SFTP (technically named the SSH2 File Transfer Protocol) are considered secure file
transfer protocols. We won't go into an in-depth comparison of the two protocols here, but knowing which secure version of FTP is supported by the Web server you are publishing your files to will mean the difference between successfully publishing your files and failure. Anytime you are communicating with a device across the Internet two key pieces of information need to be known to ensure a successful connection, the device's IP address and the port number the software on the device uses to receive messages — together these two components are called a socket.
The default port number used by SFTP is 22 and the default port number used by FTPS is 990.
Note: These are the default ports numbers for these two protocols. It is possible for a device administrator to change these port numbers. This is generally done to increase security since the defaults are well-known port numbers, if they are changed then only the users who know the correct port number to use will be able to successfully connect to the device.
This short animation (no audio) demonstrates the necessity of publishing files to a Web server to make them publicly accessible.
In order to publish a file to a Web server, Web developers need to configure their Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or File Upload software like FileZilla to use the correct File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or File Transfer Protocol Secure (FTPS) settings.
If you are not familiar with the
concept of using FTP or FTPS to publish your files to a Web server then view the
video above (note: there is no audio in this video, the narration is presented in on-screen text).
The information below will help you to:
- Configure your IDE to connect to and publish to the Student Web server using FTPS.
FTPS Server Settings
If you are familiar with configuring FTPS server settings for
your software use the following information:
FTP Server: FTPS://ia.msjc.edu:990
Directory (Site Path): (leave blank)
Username: 7-digit Student ID number
Password: Same password used to login to Canvas.
Otherwise, view the tutorial below that is specific for your software on how to configure it to use FTPS for publishing to the IA Web server.
FTPS Configuration Tutorials for Specific Software
Click on the IDE name below to learn how to configure it to
use FTP to connect and publish to the Student Web server:
NOTE: If you are using any other source code editor than DreamWeaver or Visual Studio Community, you will need to use FileZilla for publishing your assignments to the student Web server.