FTP Server

My wife was talking to her brother earlier this week. He was looking for a way to send pictures and home movies to us without using email. He has a number of files that would go past the limit that most ISPs would allow. He wanted to know if he could do a direct connect to our machine and send the files and then we would be able to distribute the files locally.

I thought about using SSH, but, had a thought. Why not set up a FTP server and he can dump his files here and then send an email to everyone else that new files are there for anyone in the family to look at. This is a good way of putting up the files as a number of people are on dial up and it won't take hours to download their email with photos/movies, they can go to the server and download only the files that are of interest to them.

I did a quick look through the Mandriva CDs for what FTP packages are available. I finally settled on GPROFTPD. It was small and simple. It took me all of five minutes to set up and the server. A generic account with read-only access was quickly created for family members. My brother-in-law had his id created quickly along with myself. Setting up the software, configuring and playing with the settings and options took one day. I tested the link from work and it didn't work. When I got home I found the problem in that I set it up as an XINET daemon rather than a stand-alone application. Once that was fixed it worked without a problem.