FTP SUSE Questions
 

Let me begin by saying I'm a Linux Newbie. With that said I have just finished setting up my first Linux box. It's SUSE Linux 9.1. I used a very good book that stepped me through the install and all went smoothly. Now I'm at the point where I want to start adding services. The first one I would like to add is FTP so people can upload and download files. I've got a bunch of questions about how to setup and configure this service.

What I would like to do is allow anonymous download from a public directory and upload and download based on a specific user login. Each user login should have seperate directories for uploading and downloading.
I guess an upload and download directory in their home directory.

At any rate her are my questions:

1. Which FTP do I use? I've read about VSFTP PureFTP and SFTP. My understanding is that SFTP is best as it's the most secure.

2. How do I install SFTP (assuming that's the one I want to use). Just activate the network service in YaST?

3. What is the easiest way to configure what I describe above?

4. Where can I find good step by step reverence material so I can learn more about the setup and configuration of FTP on SUSE.

Thank you for your patience.

Len :-)

I would use both vsftpd and sftp. I've never used PureFTP. I would use vsftpd only for the anonymouns connection, and sftp for the authenticated access. Since the public share is public, I'm sure you don't care that the data is transferred unencrypted, but when you're sending usernames and passwords across the wire, you want to use encryption. sftp relies on ssh, so everythings encrypted. I honestly don't know how to set up either in suse, but I'm sure theres an rpm available for vsftpd, and the configuration file should be /etc/vsftpd.conf. sftp usuaually works out of the box, as long as ssh is running. If you have ssh running on the maching just run "sftp username@127.0.0.1" and it should connect. If you will be connecting from windows machines, you will want to use WinSCP on the windows boxes. If you need more help, hopefully a Suse user will come along and fill the rest out.