or other optical storage.
Ubuntu FTP Server Packages
The Very Secure FTP server, vsftpd, is licensed under the GNU GPL and is
generally considered the best FTP server option from a security standpoint—
but again, most security experts recommend not deploying new FTP servers
unless you must. vsftpd is the FTP server covered in the remainder of this
chapter.
Another alternative is to use Apache (and HTTP/HTTPS) for serving files.
Using a web server to provide data downloads can reduce the need to monitor
and maintain a separate software service (or directories) on your server. This
approach to serving files also reduces system resource requirements and gives
remote users a bit more flexibility when downloading (such as enabling them
to download multiple files at once). See Chapter 25, “Apache Web Server
Management,” for more information about using Apache.
Installing FTP Software
As part of the standard installation, the client software for FTP is already
installed. You can verify that some FTP-related software is installed on your
system by using the dpkg and grep commands as follows:
Click here to view code image
matthew@seymour:~$ dpkg --get-selections | grep ftp
ftp install
This output shows only a basic FTP client. This allows you to use FTP to
connect to other computers to interact with remote files. You need an FTP
server to allow other systems to interact with files on your computer. As
mentioned earlier, this chapter covers one FTP server application: vsftpd.
If vsftpd is not installed, install the package vsftpd from the Ubuntu
repositories. For more information about installing packages, see Chapter 9,
“Managing Software.”
The FTP User
Instead of files being uploaded or managed by a current user when
anonymous connections are made to your FTP server, an FTP user is created
when vsftp is installed. This user is not a normal user per se but a name for