Over the past couple of days I’ve been setting up a new box running Windows Server 2008 r2. One of the main requirements for it was that it should be able to accept file uploads via FTP. This wasn’t too much of a problem and seemed to be relatively easy… Install the IIS role, install the FTP service and setup an FTP site along with any associated users.

All was going well and I was able to connect to the server remotely as a standard user with no problem at all. When I came to upload a file however I started to get the following error:

550 Access is denied

The Solution

After a bit of investigation I managed to solve the problem by following the steps below:

1. Open the ‘Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager’. You should be able to find this in your Start menu under ‘Administrative Tools’.

2. Once opened, right-click your FTP site and select ‘Edit Permissions…’ from the menu:

3. Select the ‘Security’ tab.

4. Click the ‘Users’ group. You can see from the permissions shown underneath that by default this group doesn’t have ‘Write’ permissions:

5. Click ‘Edit…’ and select to allow the ‘Write’ permission:

6. Click ‘OK’ to save the changes.

Once the above change has been performed you should now be able to successfully upload files without problem.