What does “[26]USER” mean in an IIS FTP log?

Question

In our IIS FTP log we have an entry that includes this:

[26]USER

Where can I look up to see the meaning of this? Particularly the number in the square brackets?

Answer 1

It appears

• 26 = connection ID
• USER = FTP Command.

That'll teach me to post before properly looking :-)

Answer 2

More information would be VERY useful: Which operating system are you running? Which ftp daemon are you running?

If you are on a Linux with a rpm based package manager you could try something like

rpm -qa | grep -i ftp

to find out which ftp packages you have installed.

Read the man page and or web page of the ftp daemon in use.

Answer 3

You can have a look at the Wikipedia Article about FTP to learn the basics of the protocol. Fort further information you can have a look the documentation of the File Transfer Protocol.

FTP is dialog based, which means that the server and client are sending in turns information and answers to requests. USER <username> is the command for authenticating at the server with the given username.