Odrive ftp and utf-8 character encoding in Win 10

Hello,
I am not sure if this is a Windows 10 issue or an Odrive issue. On my 2nd computer running windows 10 Pro I have set up the Windows inbuilt ftp server. I then connect from my 1st computer to the 2nd computer via Odrive and all seems to work just fine.

However I have noticed that I cannot “see” any folders/files which have accents in the characters eg. Umlauts. I cannot even see the placeholder files, so I can’t sync anything which has these characters.

On my 2nd computer with the ftp server, I checked under Advanced Settings and the “Allow UTF-8” is set to True.

Can you please advise if there is an another setting which needs to be made in order for Odrive to see these folders/files.

Thanks

Hi @maccra,

We’ve tested UTF-8 with FTP. I can’t remember if we have tested with IIS FTP, however.

Can you post a couple of filenames that are showing this issue that we can test with?

Can you also send over a diagnostic from the odrive tray menu

Hi @Tony

Diagnostics have been sent

I have 2 folder names (same problem whether files or folders), located in a Temp directory on the ftp server side.
The folder names are:

  • möchte
  • schön

Both of these folders do not show up un the client side (no placeholder folders, no nothing)

Thanks

Hi @maccra,
I tested this on Windows 10 against our own test FTP server, which is running ProFTPd and I am seeing folders with those names just fine, so it isn’t an inherent limitation in the odrive FTP integration.

I don’t see anything referencing those folders for FTP in the diagnostic, so it seems like the folders are just not being returned when odrive requests a listing.

I will see if I can find some time to test this with IIS FTP on Windows 10, but ti seems like something specific to it.

Hello @Tony

I hope you can find some success, because I am baflled on how to get the ftp server working on Win 10.

I have now tried FileZilla Server, and the UTF-8 encoding works fine. However no matter what I try to do I can not get FileZilla to overwrite files. I have checked boxed all the file and folder permissions, specifically Append and Delete but it does not work. All what happens is that the Odrive temp file “._xxxxx…” etc do not get converted into the real file.

Do you have any suggestion what could be prohibiting the Overwrite of files in FileZilla Server?

I have also tried XLight FTP server, and there UTF-8 does not work (even though I have checked the box for it) and also the overwriting of files does not work.

The ProFTPd which you mentioned is for Unix and Unix like systems and I read that you could install it with Cygwin, but that is getting to complicated for me. (it took me 2 days just to get FileZilla Server to work, I am no IT expert).

Anyway I think your offering of FTP server should be able to run on most native windows ftp servers (and popular 3rd party ftp servers like FileZilla) and not be too complicated to setup.

Do you have any suggestion on any native windows ftp servers which work correctly?

Thanks

Hi @maccra,
I tried several different FTP servers today, but they all hit either the the overwrite issue or the UTF-8 character issue. I’ve created a couple of dev items to work through those two, but I can’t say when they would get priority.

As an alternative, I am going through IIS WebDAV setup, trying to find the easiest way to have folks set this up. Unfortunately its a little bit more complex than FTP.

Are you tied to FTP, or would WebDAV work for your purposes too? What is your use case?

Hello @Tony,

Very much appreciated that you are looking into this. FTP was my preferred method only because I finally figured it out how to set it up.

WebDav would also be fine if I could set it up. As it sits in the Odrive folder it all looks the same. Actually I even tried setting up IIS WebDav on the weekend, but for me no sucess.

My use case is nothing special. Just want to have access to my files on the 2nd laptop under Odrive so I can sync and unsync the files as needed and keep all my remote files (either cloud or laptop) managed under Odrive with sync and unsync feature. Until I discovered the UTF-8 encoding isssue with IIS it worked great as planned. Filezilla was great also ( I think a bit quicker then IIS) but I just cn’t overwrite efiles with FileZilla. I assume WebDav would be fine, just don;t no about speed because I could not get it to work.

Hi @maccra,
I wrote up a basic install guide for setting up a WebDAV server on Windows 10. Take a look and let me know if it works for you.

Thanks!

Hello @Tony,

Thanks for the Webdav guide.
I have got it working and it appears to be working ok. For me I had to open a port in the Windows Firewall, otherwise it was blocked. Also in the Odrive web linking, I only need to add the URL to to the Port number i.e. without the folder name. I also turned on directory listing (but not sure if that was needed).

I have a file named; 2015-07-23_20-21-16 RWE Entry FB + BD.png. I could see the placeholder file, but I could not sync the file. Eliminating the “+” from the file name resolved the issue. So I assume there are some file naming conventions that need to be avoided, but I would not know what they are.

Thank you for your efforts, They are very much appreciated.

I enjoy using the Odrive software. Looking forward to your future feature updates, like backup etc.

Hi @maccra,

Can you try this?

Click on “Request Filtering” under “Default Web Site”, select “Edit Feature Settings”

Check “Allow double escaping” and see if it does better with the + in the file name.

Just an update: We’ve released a new version with several fixes for both FTP and WebDAV. This takes care of the FTP UTF-8 character issues, as well as some specific fixes for IIS for both FTP and WebDAV (you can now use standard ports for IIS WebDAV, for example).