Free how to secure ftp server software for linux

Pure FTP Server is a fast, production quality, standards-conformant FTP server based on Troll-FTPd. Pure FTP Server has no known vulnerability, it is trivial to set up, and it is especially designed for modern kernels.
Features include PAM support, IPv6, chroot()ed home directories, virtual domains, built-in ls, FXP protocol, anti-warez system, bandwidth throttling, restricted ports for passive downloads, an LDAP backend, XML output, and more.
Beginners can install a Pure-FTPd server in 5 minutes. It can be as simple as installing the package, typing "pure-ftpd &" and... thats all. You already have a running server, and clients can start to connect.
Theres no need to review any long and complex configuration file, where possible mistakes could have security and reliability implications. Pure-FTPd uses simple command-line switches to enable the features you need.
You can limit the number of simultaneous users, limit their bandwidth to avoid starving your ADSL or cable-modem link, hide system files (chroot), have upload/download ratios, and moderate new uploads.
Custom messages can be displayed at login-time (even changing fortune files) and when an user enters a new directory. Also, to avoid your disks being filled up, you can defined a maximal percentage, and new uploads will be disallowed once this percentage is reached.
The FXP (server-to-server) protocol is implemented. It can be available for everyone, or only for authenticated users.
Kiddies are using common brute-forcing tools that are trying to discover hidden directories. Pure-FTPd provides a protection against this. Anonymous access is secure by default. For instance, users cant access dot-files (.bash_history, .rhosts, ...) unless you explicitely enable this.
And to watch whos doing what, the pure-ftpwho command shows a table with currently active sessions, how much bandwidth is taken by every user, what files they are uploading or downloading, where they are coming from, etc.
Enhancements:
- User names can now be up to 127 characters long.
- Compilation with PAM support has been fixed on Mac OS X, and the MySQL PASSWORD() function can now be used with MySQL >= 4.1.
- Logging now has the correct timezone.
- Support for charset conversions (RFC2640) has been implemented. Large files are now handled by default, using sendfile64() if possible. SITE UTIME and OPTS MLST have been implemented.
- MySQL queries can now include multiple statements and call MySQL 5 stored procedures.
- Transferring a lot of small files is now much faster than in previous versions.

Secure FTP is a client application that allows for a 128-bit encrypted secure connection to be made to a server that supports FTP over SSL (or FTPS).
The application can be run via its graphical user interface (GUI) or from the command-line interface (CLI), allowing for headless (scriptable) operation. This makes Secure FTP a great option for both novice and advanced users.
The client is fully RFC 2228 compliant and offers both types of SSL connection options: explicit and implicit, which means more server compatibility.
Secure FTP is free to use for noncommercial use. Those wishing to use the client for commercial purposes are granted a license free of charge for 30 days.
The client is supported on Windows, Mac OS X, and any Unix platform where a Java 2 runtime environment (version 1.4+) is present. It was written in 100% pure Java.
Enhancements:
- The software was translated into French.
- Minor bug fixes and library updates were done.

Net::FTPServer is a secure, extensible and configurable Perl FTP server.
SYNOPSIS
ftpd [--help] [-d] [-v] [-p port] [-s] [-S] [-V] [-C conf_file]
[-P pidfile] [-o option=value]
Net::FTPServer is a secure, extensible and configurable FTP server written in Perl.
Current features:
- Authenticated FTP access.
- Anonymous FTP access.
- Complete implementation of current RFCs.
- ASCII or binary type file transfers.
- Active or passive mode file transfers.
- Run standalone or from inetd(8).
- Security features: chroot, resource limits, tainting, protection against buffer overflows.
- IP-based and/or IP-less virtual hosts.
- Complete access control system.
- Anonymous read-only FTP personality.
- Virtual filesystem allows files to be served from a database.
- Directory aliases and CDPATH support.
- Extensible command set.
- Generate archives on the fly.
Installation:
A standard ftpd.conf file is supplied with the distribution. Full documentation for all the possible options which you may use in this file is contained in this manual page. See the section CONFIGURATION below.
After doing make install, the standard ftpd.conf file should have been installed in /etc/ftpd.conf. You will probably need to edit this file to suit your local configuration.
Also after doing make install, several start-up scripts will have been installed in /usr/sbin/*ftpd.pl. (On Debian in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin). Each start-up script starts the server in a different configuration: either as a full FTP server, or as an anonymous-only read-only FTP server, etc.
The commonly used scripts are:
- /usr/sbin/ftpd.pl
- /usr/sbin/ro-ftpd.pl
The first script is for the full FTP server.
These scripts assume that the perl interpreter can be found on the current $PATH. In the rare situation when this is not the case, you may need to edit these scripts.

KcmPureftpd is an KDE KControl module for configuring pure-ftpd FTP server. The goal is to have medium users to configure their server securely and conveniently, without the burden of knowing tons of command line switches.

KcmPureftpd consist from two KControl modules:

* Script Generator - Its intended for system administrators which need to make or modify startup scripts for various administered servers. Of course, it work very well for your own little Linux/UNIX machine.
* Statistics - This module allow you to track statistics from pure-ftpd. You can see real time information about FTP connection on your FTP server as well you may follow information written to syslog by the server.

Boston University Linux is based on Fedora Core Linux, but specifically tailored for the BU environment.

Weve added security updates, made modifications to make software work better with the way things are set up here, and added some applications that we think you might like to have.

The server edition of BU Linux provides a modern, stable, and robust server platform suitable for long-term deployment in many roles throughout the university.

Supported Hardware

Currently, only i686-class machines are supported. This includes almost everything from Intels Pentium Pro on. AMD64 and Intel EM64T systems will work fine using their 32-bit mode. Watch for a 64-bit version later this summer.

Specific Notes on Server Applications

Mail Server:

BU Linux 4.5 Server Edition (Zodiac) includes three different choices of Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) for your mail server. Each of these open source servers has its unique strengths, and you can install one or more and use the utility system-switch-mail to choose which is active.

The default is IBMs Postfix, which is designed from scratch to be secure and easily configurable. On a newly-installed BU Linux machine, Postfix is configured to exchange mail on the local machine and to send mail out to other systems, but not receive mail from the network. For this reason, outgoing mail from global BU accounts (those matching valid BU login names and with the proper UID) will appear to come from @bu.edu rather than @hostname.bu.edu. Local users (including system accounts) will retain the hostname, but without reconfiguration, any replies will bounce. Changing the system to accept mail is easy; see the BU Linux web site for details.

For the maximum flexibility and for compatibility with existing configurations (and with existing expertise), we also include the traditional standard Sendmail. And, if you have particular special needs, you may find that the new Exim MTA fits your situation best.

No matter which MTA you choose, please contact us if you need any assistance. With so many options available, the situation can be confusing, and its unfortunately easy for an accidentally misconfigured system to become a target for spam relayers. We have significant expertise at configuring both Postfix and Sendmail in a variety of situations, and will be glad to help.

FTP Server:

This release of BU Linux provides two options for FTP. The first is vsftpd, which is designed to be simple and secure. This is the most appropriate for almost all situations, but if you require more power and flexibility, we also include ProFTPd, which has many more options and a configuration syntax similar to that of the Apache web server.

Please also remember that FTP is an insecure protocol and that any passwords used travel over the network in plain text. For this reason, its best to avoid anything but anonymous FTP. For user-authenticated file transfer, use SSH and SFTP. (SFTP is provided by the OpenSSH server and enabled by default.)

Web Server:

The web server software included in BU Linux is the industry-standard Apache httpd. We also include PHP 4.3 and many other useful tools for building a web server.
If you need to provide authenticated access to web services to BU users, please contact us and we will provide you with our University-standard Weblogin module. This provides a powerful and flexible means of single-signon access control for the BU user community and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to provide this for your users.

Database Server:

BU Linux includes MySQL 4.1 and PostgreSQL 7.4. For less demanding SQL applications, we also provide SQLite 3, which provides simple SQL databases without the management overhead of running a SQL server.

TwoFTPd provides a simple, secure, efficient FTP server.
Twoftpd is an FTP server that strives to be secure, simple, and efficient.
None of the commands can cause execution of other programs, and the normal model of execution does a chroot to the logged in users directory immediately after authentication.
The name "twoftpd" comes from the fact that there are two parts to the server: an authenticating front end, which contains no file or data transfer code, and one of two back ends, which contain all the data transfer code.
Enhancements:
- Added a fake listing routine to twoftpd-drop, to avoid errors on GUI clients that require LIST or NLST.
- Fixed a compile failure on FreeBSD in the newer MDTM command. Thanks Sergei Kolobov.

Web-FTP 1.5.x introduces Crytpo Card support, and also some support for connecting to MS ftp servers.

Crypto card support allows people to connect to ftp servers that use crypto card security. Lemme know if it works for you.

Web-FTP is a fully featured ftp client designed for secure file management when used in conjunction with an SSL enabled web server.

As a secondary function it can serve as an FTP client for users whos firewalls block FTP, since all communication is through the HTTP protocol.

Once you log in to Web-FTP it retains a session, which runs locally on your server, subsequent calls to the cgi (with the proper cookie) reconnect you to your session, therefore maintaining state.

Since everything passes through a cgi, if you put that CGI on a secure web-server you will have secure ftp (as long as the ftp is the same machine as the http server, or is behind a firewall).