Anythought on running VSFTP in a DMZ?

In terms of vulnerabilities it is considered secure:
http://secunia.com/product/3268/

Just remember that unless you are using an ssl encrypted connection any passwords will be sent in plain text. As an anonymous ftp system it is perfect.

Thanks for the info

would sftp be a good alternative to vsftp? as it would encrpt the data?

Use vsftp with ssl, that should work well for you.

is there any reason not to use sftp? is it not as secure? it is also just for personal use ie I do not have users accesses the server?

sftp is more secure and I would recomend using it where possible. The only problem comes when people don't know about sftp or have sftp clients, if it is just for youself there should be no issue.

Force the users to use sftp. WinSCP is so easy even a windows user can use it

You can also use something like scponly to put them in a chroot environment if that's needed.

Thought I would add this for any DreamweaverMX 2004 (v. 7.0.1) users out there. Dreamweaver has built-in SFTP client, select check the "Use secure FTP (SFTP)" option Not sure about earlier versions, but if I remember correctly I had to setup up putty and tunnel in somehow (a friend helped me set it up) in earlier version

I never thought of that either, thanks!

I wouldnt say that... I started an online intro OS class (-sigh- dont ask, lots of drama lol), and its basically learning UNIX from a Linux environment. It took quite a few people a little longer than I would have thought to learn WinSCP.

I'm willing to bet if we weren't in a class, and instead they were trying to download something off a website, they would have given up instead. We -need- putty/winscp to do our work in class, so they were forced

Instead of forcing your users to use program XYZ, they should force -YOU- to install server XYZ. In this case, VSFTPD over SSL, so you dont make users switch FTP clients that they've grown to love (especially web designers, do NOT make them switch their beloved FTP clients!! ) After all, we're the techies here right?

No, not all of us. Techies answer the phone and say "Help desk, how can I assist you?"

Personally, I'm a systems engineer. My users don't dictate policy. I do.