The warning nobody should click past # Every SSH and SFTP client has the same scary moment: you connect to a server you’ve connected to a hundred times before, and instead of a normal prompt you get something like this from OpenSSH:
Three protocols, one job, very different guts # FTP, FTPS, and SFTP all claim to do the same thing — move a file from one place to another — and partners use the names almost interchangeably, which is exactly the problem. They are three genuinely different protocols with different port models, different security properties, and different failure modes, and the SFTP Server Adapter and SFTP Client Adapter you configure in Sterling only make sense once you know which one you’re actually running. This post goes through each one on its own terms, then spends the back half on SFTP specifically, since that’s what carries the overwhelming majority of partner traffic in B2Bi.
The connection runs backward from what you’d guess # Most people’s first assumption about a box sitting in the DMZ is that your trusted, internal network reaches out to it — the secure side initiates, the exposed side listens. A Perimeter Server does the opposite. The core B2Bi engine sitting safely inside your network never opens a connection out into the DMZ at all. Instead, the Perimeter Server — the box actually facing partners and the internet — dials back in to the core engine and holds that connection open. Partner traffic lands on the DMZ box first, and only then gets forwarded inward over a channel the DMZ side itself established.
The confusion I flagged back in Part 1 # I called this out in Part 1 and promised to come back to it: File Gateway is not a separate product competing with B2Bi. It’s a purpose-built UI and routing layer sitting directly on top of B2Bi’s mailbox and adapter machinery, built specifically so partner file exchange can be managed without anyone touching BPML directly. I still see people who’ve run Sterling for years talk about the two as if they’re alternatives you choose between. They’re not — one is the foundation, the other is a way of working with that foundation without writing a Business Process by hand.
What is a Business Process # A Business Process is the workflow that strings adapters and services together into something that actually does a job: receive a file, validate it, map it, encrypt it, hand it to an adapter for delivery, log every step along the way. It’s the thing Part 1 called “the closest thing the platform has to a heart” — because almost nothing meaningful happens in Sterling B2B Integrator outside of one running.
What is an Adapter # An Adapter is a service whose entire job is reaching outside Sterling B2B Integrator — connecting the Business Process Engine to “dissimilar systems and applications” that live outside the environment (IBM Documentation). An SFTP adapter opens a connection to a partner’s SFTP server. An AS2 adapter speaks the AS2 protocol to a trading partner’s gateway. Same underlying mechanism as any other service — the Business Process Engine calls it, it runs, it returns a result — but the work itself happens somewhere else, over a network, against a system you don’t control.
The admin console home page — where every session starts What is IBM B2Bi # IBM Sterling B2B Integrator does one job: move files between your business and your trading partners — banks, suppliers, logistics providers, whoever needs EDI documents, flat files, or XML exchanged reliably and traceably — and know exactly what happened to every file at every step. That’s it. Everything else exists to support that one job.
