FTP deamons for OS X

jesnil

Registered
There have been alot of discussion about wich FTPd that you can, should and would use on OS X.

And I have tested most of them. Like Rumpus, CrushFTPd (not deamons), Mac OSX FTPd, NcFTPd, ProFTPd.
And I was never quite happy with them.

But now I found a great FTPd and I just wanted you all to know about it. Its named PureFTPd and it is free (GPL). You can use several databases for usermanagment including its on virtualUser tool. And you can make IP-restricted accounts. And Bandwidth restrictions. Wooosh! :D

Check it out: http://pureftpd.sourceforge.net
 
Thanks for the recommendation. I will check it out. I am using NcFTPd now, but the user monitoring isn't working, and I was told by the author that he didn't have much incentive to get it working. :-/
 
I'm still very happy with ProFTPd. After a year using it in a production environment on a busy OS X server, as well as in other settings, I have had no problems at all. Highly configurable.
 
hazmat : Thats what I was missing in all other FTPds out there too. But PureFTPd has it.

Sample output:

Code:
+------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| PID  |  Login  |For/Spd| What |                 File/IP                   |
+------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| 1832 | guest   | 12:51 |  DL  | lvr-th2.tgz                               |
|  ''  |    ''   |  36K/s|   3% | ->           xxxx-xx-xx-xxx.ph.ph.cox.net |
+------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| 5219 | mem-mast| 07:51 |  DL  | jap-the.rar                               |
|  ''  |    ''   |  46K/s|  15% | ->           xxxx-xx-xx-xxx.ph.ph.cox.net |
+------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| 9186 | mem-mast| 00:11 | IDLE |                                           |
|  ''  |    ''   |   ''  |  ''  | ->           xxxx-xx-xx-xxx.ph.ph.cox.net |
+------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------------------+

Its not advanced put as you see it outputs the PID to so you can kill a FTPd session easy. I like it much couse; its simple and its Terminal... :D
 
I use pureftpd on a freeBSD machine for 3 websites and I have no complaints. It works well with inetd and its fast and highly configurable. I reccomend it fully. If you need any help or have problems I can help you.

If its something I can't do the support guys at pureftpd are awesome they helped me through a firewall issue.

~Yoshi
 
jesnil, thanks for the demo there. I also like NcFTPd's, where it's just line by line. Can you get that with pureftpd as well or just that graph? Doesn't matter, really; I will still install this and check it out. Seems to have all the functionality I like in an ftpd, like virtual users.
 
Okay, I just built it from source and it looks good. I find it odd that all the config options are from the command line and not from a flat config file. But whatever. Do you have a shell script for StartupItems?

Thanks again.
 
Sorry but I have no StartUp script for it. I havent got the time to learn scripting startup items yet.

But with OS X, its allmost waste of time. Couse my uptime is 24 days right now!
 
Ah, no biggie. I'll just put it in inetd.conf I guess. I wish the pureftpd mailing list archives were searchable!

One problem with it, though. I followed the instructions to make a virtual user. /etc/pureftpd.passwd was created, then I ran the 'pure-pw mkdb' and it created pureftpd.pdb. But, when I try to log in as that user, I get:

Unable to read the indexed puredb file (or old format detected) - Try pure-pw mkdb

Any idea what the problem is? I don't see anything at the site about it.

Thanks.
 
Did you give the rigth path to the pureftpd.pdb file in the start options. Like "puredb:/etc/pureftpd.pdb".

My start command line is:
Code:
pure-ftpd -l puredb:/etc/pureftpd.pdb -W -c 5 -E &

All options:
Code:
pure-ftpd v1.0.11

-1      --logpid
-4      --ipv4only
-A      --chrooteveryone
-a      --trustedgid    <opt>
-b      --brokenclientscompatibility
-c      --maxclientsnumber      <opt>
-B      --daemonize
-C      --maxclientsperip       <opt>
-d      --verboselog
-D      --displaydotfiles
-e      --anonymousonly
-E      --noanonymous
-f      --syslogfacility        <opt>
-g      --pidfile       <opt>
-G      --norename
-h      --help
-H      --dontresolve
-I      --maxidletime   <opt>
-i      --anonymouscantupload
-j      --createhomedir
-K      --keepallfiles
-k      --maxdiskusagepct       <opt>
-l      --login <opt>
-L      --limitrecursion        <opt>
-M      --anonymouscancreatedirs
-m      --maxload       <opt>
-N      --natmode
-p      --passiveportrange      <opt>
-P      --forcepassiveip        <opt>
-r      --autorename
-R      --nochmod
-s      --antiwarez
-S      --bind  <opt>
-t      --anonymousbandwidth    <opt>
-T      --userbandwidth <opt>
-U      --umask <opt>
-u      --minuid        <opt>
-V      --trustedip     <opt>
-w      --allowuserfxp
-W      --allowanonymousfxp
-x      --prohibitdotfileswrite
-X      --prohibitdotfilesread
-z      --allowdotfiles
-Z      --customerproof

Hope you get lucky! :D
 
Oh man do I feel dumb. I was pointing -l to pureftpd.passwd, not pureftpd.pdb. Now it works. :D

Thanks!
 
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