Technofunction

FTP is the most commonly used for transferring of the files between the servers and computer and there are many FTP clients like filezilla which can be used to transfer file via FTP between various computers no matter which operating system is being used on it.

You might want to go through my previous post on Overview of FTP on Enterprise Linux convering all the basic details which will be used in configuring an FTP in this post.

Ensure that FTP is allowed through the firewall else SELinux is off and iptables are off. Start with installing the FTP package “vsftpd” using YUM. For creating a Yum in Enterprise Linux you may want to go through this post. You need to have root access in to configure an FTP Server.

#yum install vsftpd

Once you install this package the following directory will be created /var/ftp/pub . where you actually have files to be shared on the FTP , although you may give access to your local users to access their home directories as well but this is far to advanced and various constraints of security are needed to be considered before choosing that option. For now let’s configure the pub directory to be accessed via ftp user.

Next you need to configure the ftp configuration file in order to create an FTP Server. The configuration file for FTP is vsftpd.conf and needs to be edited as follows

#vi /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf

You can enable or disable much functionality using this configuration file. For this post we will set FTP so that anonymous user may not be able to login, local user are allowed to login, local user are able to write , make directories and able to upload and download files you may further want to change idle time out settings etc which you may do by changing values in this configuration file.

For this in line 12 set anonymous enable to no

In Line 18 uncomment the write enable=yes

Uncomment line number 27

Uncomment line 31

After this editing save the file and exit.

Now you need to restart the ftp service for the changes to take effect.

#service vsftpd restart

You may login to this ftp server by unix or windows operating system

In Linux simply enter the command like

#ftp <ip-address>

Than supply username and password of the local user, you download and upload files by using get and put command inside the Ftp terminal, when you want to exit use “bye”

Remember users like root are not allowed to login via ftp by default. If you still want to login via root user than you need to perform some additional steps , wait for my next post for this.

In windows operating system, use ftp client software such as filezilla to transfer file via ftp.

Still have some doubt leave it in comment section, we will get back to you.

Written by: Ankit on September 26, 2011.