Hi Hal,

An FTP site can be pointed to the VSS 6.0d shared folder. But it's only to
the shared folder. The content of the folder is in specific format and is
for VSS 6.0d client to read, which we cannot read ourselves. Currently, VSS
6.0d itself only support file share, you get try to search for some 3rd
party components which makes it support HTTP. But as far as I know, there
isn't any component that support FTP yet. You can also consider upgrading
to VSS 2005, it has HTTP provider by default.

Hope that helps.

Kevin Yu

Hi Hal,

I haven't tried this configuration, but I've found on the net some articles
telling that you can map a drive letter to a ftp location
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/14486/14486.html
http://glosoli.blogspot.com/2005/10/map-drive-via-ftp-or-webdav.html (this
seems to work)
So theoretically you can point on the server the ftproot to VSS database's
folder, and from clients access it as X:\srcsafe.ini
Now whether VSS will be able to use the database on X:\ drive might be
another story (might require setting the database directly in registry under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\SourceSafe\Databases, because I seem to
remeber VSS6 was trying to do some translation from the drive name X:\ to
the direct  network location \\server\share, which will obviously fail for
such X: drive mapped to a ftp location).
Anyway, if you give it a try, let us know if you succeeded...

One important note though: FTP access is unsecure. Your data will be
transmitted over Internet in clear-text, so a malicious man in the middle
might intercept the file contents you're getting, hashes of vss passwords,
etc.

It might be simpler to simply set the server as a (secure) VPN serer, have
the client machines connect via VPN, and access the VSS database using a
direct file share.
Or, if performance is important, use either VSS2005 (which uses http/https)
or 3rd party tools like SourceOffSite that allow remote access to VSS
databases.