Tag Archives: FTP

Are you having problems connecting to the FTP server ?

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A few of our intrepid HTML commandos tried connecting to the shiny new all singing dancing PureFTPD server. Some got through okay (hey, the server ninjas verified there username/password before giving them the go ahead) but some were stumped when they couldn’t connect

Here’s a few things HTML commandos and users of the ftp server should check before calling for help

  • Am I connecting to the right server ? Maybe you fat-fingered the server name or IP address
  • Am I using the right username/password. Cut/Paste this from a text editor to verify
  • Am I using FTP/TLS and not SFTP
  • Did I try using PASV (Passive) mode connections instead of Active mode connections. This option is typically available when one is configuring the ftp client to connect to a specific server

In most cases, switching to Passive mode makes everything Just Work

If you want the real lowdown, we’ll point you to this article
Active FTP versus Passive FTP, a Definitive Explanation

Getting new content onto the server

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So we have a scalable webserver for our static content, now we need to let our crack HTML commandos upload new photos,audio,video to it. For that we need a FTP server.

On our old server, our FTP work-horse was Proftpd. However, we’ve been using it with various patches which are not applicable to the new version and our volunteers had identified another ftp server PureFTPD which offered the features we needed, basically locking users to their own directory when they logged in (this is called chrooting in this context), providing for quotas (we used to give 20MB to jamaats, we have now decided to give 50MB. Also, pureftpd supported virtual users as well as SSL/TLS.

For the new server, we are mandating that all ftp connections/transfer happen over SSL/TLS. Security is important to us (we’ve been using encrypted channels to administer the server remotely since 1998) and it’s time that our users also took advantage of such technologies.

We’ve tested our ftp server with the following ftp clients

Just to make it clear, FTP over SSL/TLS is not the same as SFTP. We have no plans of providing support for SFTP for now