I've got ftp running on my slackware 10 box. If I open firefox on the local machine and ftp://user@mydomain.com, I get the password box and my home directory shows up fine. Now on my other winxp machine I can ftp to my site, and get the user login box, and ender my info fine, but then I just get the flashlight and folder that stays there and no files show. I set myself as the owner of my directory with full permissions, but I just get the flashlight.

Now I went ahead and removed ftp user from /etc/ftpusers to allow annonymous login and gave everyone full permissions. I put a test file in there and went back to my winxp machine. Logs in fine with no password and shows the file.

Am I missing something on the permissions or ownership? My username is Jeff, and I am the owner of my home directory, and I log in with the same info, so what gives?

Well, don't use the built-in ftp in internet explorer. use the command line one or download another free ftp client.

It would also be good to know what ftpd you have and your config file.
I advise everybody to use vsftpd as it is very stable, secure and light.

- omes

i recommend proftpd myself

but try using an ftp client. slackware has gftp client that works fine. on windows boxes get your self filezilla from sourceforge. It is really awesome.

proftpd is slow and has caused much trouble for me. There is a reason all the big guys (ftp.redhat.com, ftp.suse.com, ftp.debian.org, ftp.openbsd.org, ftp.freebsd.org, ftp.gnu.org, ftp.gnome.org, ftp.kde.org, ftp.kernel.org and so on) uses vsftpd...

"Over the 24 hours, vsftpd has served 2.6Tb (yes, terabytes) with a concurrent user count often over 1,500. This is on a single machine." - http://vsftpd.beasts.org/

"vsftpd was designed and implemented from the ground up with security it mind.

1. It fixes fundamental design flaws present in most installations of wu-ftpd, proftpd and even bsd-ftpd by not over-using the dangerous root user.
2. It makes use of powerful security facilities such as capabilities and chroot.
3. It employs secure coding techniques to make buffer overflows a solved problem." - http://vsftpd.beasts.org/

filezilla worked fine, but that isn't really what I was hoping for. I should be able to just use IE if needed. Any reason why this would happen or solution to fix it?

Also, I noticed I could browse pretty much my whole machine through ftp. This isn't the best thing if I wanted to create other users and allow ftp. Do I have to create a new group and put the users in that group so they can't see anything but their home directory?

you have to set up your ftpd to chroot or 'jail' users to the home directory to keep them from browsing your whole comp. how you do this depends on the ftpd your using. I got it to work on proftpd at a computer at work, but i used webmin to set that up, so you might want to look at the documentation for your ftpd.

I don't know why ie isn't working... maybe it has to do with the fact that most ftp clients use passv mode by default but most ftpd's are set up as active. but that's a shot in the dark. passive mode servers are difficult to keep behind firewalls, so there is a security risk with using passive mode ftp servers.

and Omes, i will have to look at vsftpd it sounds neat...

I had proftp in use and lets just say it was not secure @ all