- I want to use it for data exchange in a local network.
- no more then 10 persons will be on it at the same time.
- it should be secure
- easy to set up
- speed
- anonymous login (up/download)
- i want to login as regular user to get access to my home directory

I hope thats enough information to choose a good server for me.
(and i do not need answers like: 'all ftp servers will do that' )

My system is suse linux 8.0

ProFTPD is pretty good. You can get it from here.

There is also a german site for proftpd and they had a RPM package for SuSE 8.0. i edited the config files to my needs told inetd to tale care of port 21 and all looks fine so far.

maybe one final thing, is there an utility that can tell me when someone starts downloading. something like a kicker icon or so that blinks or something like that.
I think i will look for some application like that maye there is a gkrellm plugin or so.

using 'cat /var/log/xferlog' can't be the best to verify if someone was there

finally thanks for this suggestion and no i could not wait for other proposals, as i could not stand it to try things out

"ProFTPD is pretty good. You can get it from here."

Thats what I use (and would have recommended). Seems decent enough.

I just have to figure out how to link it to my Apache DocumentRoot giving me upload rights (I already have it serving anonymous connections) now...

If you are going to access documents and data via LAN only, I would not use either FTP or telnet, I would recommend using SSH, for security reasons. If you need FTP, most Linux Distros come with both ProFTP, and WU FTP.

you should setup ftp for anonymous only, upload is a bad idea on anonymous.

If you do setup anonymous upload you need to put the file in a seperate partition from everything else. You should also make the folder write only, so they will not be able to download uploaded files. if you don't then people will use it for illegal purposes.


in your ftp pub folder you should put a copy of "putty"

then you can download it from any machine. It's a simple set of executable files for ssh and sftp

then you could use sftp for non-anonymous uploads to anywhere you want.

I'd use VSFTP...

You can get it here at it's home Very Secure FTPD

I have used it with great success. No exploits either...

I second the notion of VSFTP.