Would like to install personal FTP, SSH client and outside access with GUI
 

Hello All,

Very new to the scene but I am glad I have joined to get my feet wet in Linux. It truly is an amazing OS. Please bear with me for I have many objectives I would like to achieve but maybe not the right terminology.

I Have Centos 6 X64 bit.
I would like to:
- Install FTP
- Allow users with login: username and password
- Connect outside my network let’s say from different locations, Japan and America.
- Client logs in and has GUI
- SSH or some security to encrypt message when downloading my personal files
- Some sort of monitoring applications to see who logged in, and got what
- Do LVM on 2TB drives just in case if I need to increase size when needed

What I have:
- 2TB WD hard drives
- Centos 6
- Two cisco switches and routers ~ will configure later with ACL but now would like the FTP side done


Any help I would greatly appreciate. please stick with me through the whole process and I am willing to do paypal transfer as a thank you for your time and hard work.

Hi Yogisha40, welcome to LQ!
There are several ftp servers available that you can install like pure-ftpd or proftpd (among others). These servers are strongly configurable, I guess pure-ftpd is less complex than proftpd. By default it will allow users to login with there personal password to their /home-directory. You can adjust that but it will take a while to read the documentation. These servers will log automatically log who logged in and you can adjust the logging to your needs. Probably there are apps to visualise the logs but I don't know.

For ssh access you have to activate an ssh daemon. Probably there is an admin tool for this in CentOs (I don't know). That will not be a big thing.

Might be helpful to follow this link:
http://www.servermom.com/how-to-inst...entos-6-4/789/

So have a lot of fun
J

FTP is a very insecure protocol (it's a plain-text protocol). If it's the same machine, I would just let the users SCP files over to the machine and vice versa.

FTP was not a secure protocol.Its never encrypt data while transferring over network .Use secure copy protocol (scp) transfer data over network


Check out below link to configure Lvm

http://www.tcpdump.com/kb/os/linux/c...lvm/intro.html

Thanks for all the help.

some people say FTP is bad?

in that case port 21 or 22 with SSH would secure this?

basically I want ot allow desktop users at home to securely donwload and upload files. these are seperate desktops in different rooms.

I have 2 lapotps I carry with me for travel I would like to acces this server on the road. <- which im guessing SCP?

basic scenario, donwload and upload files securely at home and on the road. SSH prefrered and I guess SCP at home network.

monitoring as stated before would be great.

GUI if possible for users. I am perfectly fins with my lovely CLI.

This is a server in the corner of the room once confidured. the WD black caviar are cheap and now have 6TB total. I make alot of autocad and 3d drawings I would like to keep.

Thank you all it has been a great help so far.

you will need to port forward ssh traffic (port 22) on your router to the pc running the ssh server.

all logs would be generated in /var/log/secure.

for remote desktop i use xrdp.

Definitely use the sshd server and as hinted above, install the Filezilla client on the client systems.
You can setup default settings, but if you specify port 22 in filezilla it will use the ssh server.
I definitely wouldn't recommend FTP for the situation.
(NB: when using Filezilla, it'll use sftp which is the ssh util that looks like ftp, but encrypted).
scp is more for cli usage, and also part of the sshd install..

If the users for example load up images to show them on the web or send other not very confidential data then ftp is the better choice, I think.

No it's not.

Definitely not. As I said earlier, FTP is a plain text protocol. That means that when you send your username and password, it goes to the server in plain text, I.E. not encrypted. You're way better off using SFTP or SCP.

Hello All,

You guys are awesome! Thanks for taking the time about this.

so in theory, sftp filezilla account for security. Install SSH server where I can look up logs?

ACL and ip tables I can handle that part easily.

but if you guys find anything else similar that has security as key for users at different sites I am always interested in learning.

Thanks,

yogisha