Fedora™ 7 and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® Bible

Chapter 20. Setting Up an FTP Server

In This Chapter

• Understanding FTP servers

• Using the vsFTPd FTP server

• Getting more information about FTP servers

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) has been the standard method for sharing files over the Internet for many years. Even with the popularity of the Web, which made document database services such as Gopher and WAIS obsolete, FTP servers are still the most common way to make directories of documents and software available to the public over the Internet.

File-sharing applications, such as NFS and Samba, are excellent tools for sharing files and directories over a private network. For organizations that need to share large numbers of files over public networks, however, FTP server software provides more robust tools for sharing files and protecting your computer systems. Also, FTP client software (for accessing FTP servers) is available for any type of computer that can access a network.

This chapter describes how to set up and maintain an FTP server using the Very Secure FTP Server package (vsFTPd).

Warning

Configuring your FTP server to share private files or to allow users to upload files to your server involves more risks than just allowing downloads. In fact, because FTP uses clear-text passwords, it is vulnerable to password sniffing. For secure environments, consider setting up an FTP server using a chrooted sftp (secure FTP), which causes communications between clients and your FTP site to be encrypted and client access allowed only to a limited ...