I'm glad you like Simon, but am sorry the FTP tests aren't reliable with your server.

Simon has two FTP services built-in: "FTP" and "FTP Directory Listing". Which one are you using?

The "FTP" service doesn't use the unix ftp command; it works like the "Web (HTTP)" service, connecting to the server via high-level Cocoa networking functions.

The "FTP Directory Listing" service is a Script-based one, which does use the unix ftp command. You can see what it does via its Edit Service window.

So I finally got this working correctly. I used it like you said, but not long ago, we had a hardware failure on the machine and Simon never notified us that it could not access the FTP directory through the FTP Directory Listing service.

This concerned me greatly and in looking into it, whether the machine was accessible or not, Simon would never come back with a failure.

So with the FTP service failing constantly with a Windows machine and the FTP Directory service never failing ever, I began looking at other methods of checking if this server was running or not.

Using an applescript seemed to be the inevitable choice for me. My other idea was just host a dummy IIS website and check against that to ensure the computer itself was still running (although this doesn't confirm the service is running).

Knowing that either of those two options would do the trick, I still wanted to understand why FTP Directory Listing service didn't seem to work at all. Without any knowledge of the results I was getting back, I attempted to play with the "Smart Change" feature and put characters in there. Once I had the correct characters (the characters returned from the FTP server via the script the service runs), this service worked perfectly. When the server was running, the check came back with a success. When the server was offline, the service failed. PERFECT!

The reason for my reply here is just to possibly help anyone else that may run into this issue and want a simple check of wether their FTP server is working or not.

My start character was 'd' and my end character was '-' in the Smart Change detection area. This is because 'd--------' is returned to Simon via the FTP server. I tried making a folder and using it's name, but that didn't work (no clue why).

Seeing the results of what's returned to Simon in a log window of some kind would be a great convenience.

Jessee

Haha, thanks! The preview option was the perfect "easy button" I was searching for, for over an hour! :)

And good to know about having text in the Start text and the End text blank, I figured it'd work that way, but I was just happy I got it working in the end, so I left it alone.

This product has been beyond outstanding for us! I recommend it to anyone I can!

-Jessee