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

• LFTP (Unix, MacOS X)
  SSL/TLS is automatically detected and works out of the box.
• FileZilla (Windows)
  you must use the “FTP over TLS (explicit encryption)” option

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