Hi, I am new to Linux and have just set up my Mandrake 8.1. Can anyone guide me in setting up FTP services from my computer.

A little info about the setup we have. We have a ADSL connection but two computers share it through a router and think there is some in-built firewall that is currently enabled. I would want a pretty secure ftp connection in a sense that only authorized users can log in through specific IP's.

If all these is too much, for the time being I would just need a simple ftp setup that I can turn on and off.

Thanks in advance for your help.

The first thing you would need to do is get access to the router's configuration setup. If you can't get to this then you will have a hard time setting it up. You need to be able to turn on port forwarding from the ext IP address to your int IP. If you can setup ports that are different than the normal ones that would be really good.
ex) port 21212 is the port your ftp server is attached to instead of port 21.

Thanks bbnz for the reply.

Yea I do have access to the Router and can configure it. Currently I am making the router work as a DHCP server for my internal LAN, I guess I would need to turn off that feature and assign static internal IP address. In that regard, do you think I would also need a static WAN IP (even though I hardly turn off my router) ?

Now, say I do everything thats necessary on the router. How do I configure the ftp server on my Linux box? Heck, i dont even know what is the program I should be running and what information I should be putting in? Also as I mentioned before, is it possible to allow only authorized entry through the ftp port -- (is it to be done on the router's end or on my ftp server?)

Thanks in advance for your help

I am not sure what program to use to setup ftp on my mandrake machine. I would really appreciate any help if someone can let me know how to do it or point me to some useful resources. Thanks

I'm running Proftpd on my Mandy 8.1 system and it's working quite well. Use the Software Manager to install it; it's on the 8.1 CDs. The installation includes a sample configuration file; you have to jump thru a few hoops to be able to use anonymous FTP, but since you want to restrict access to just authorized users it's a piece of cake. The defaults take care of it; the only thing to watch for is that you have to put each user and password in your system files so that they could log onto your system if you had telnet or rlogin enabled.

You can restrict them to their home directories on the system, though, with a single line in the proftpd.conf file, and you can control exactly what they're allowed to do via FTP while you're at it.