FTP server in the Cloud
This is not a complete article: This is a draft, a work in progress that is intended to be published into an article, which may or may not be ready for inclusion in the main wiki. It should not necessarily be considered factual or authoritative.
Parent page: CC-Cloud
Better alternatives to FTP
If you have the freedom to choose an alternative to FTP consider the follow options if you need:
- Anonymous FTP
-
- Read Only
- Use HTTP, see Creating a Webserver on CC-Cloud
- Read/write
- Providing anonymous write access to your server is a very bad idea. Anyone could upload a file, with the potential for it to be a malicious script or executable.
- Authenticated FTP
- If you are authenticating FTP users, a better and easier alternative is SFTP.
Another alternative is FTPS, which is an extension of FTP which uses TLS to encrypt data sent and received. When authenticating users via passwords the transmitted data should be encrypted or else there is a possibility that an eavesdropper could discover the password. In addition it is generally a bad idea to allow password logins on your VM as there are often many automated brute-force password attempts made on any machine connected to the internet. Instead use ssh-key authentication (see SSH Keys). SFTP can be configured to use ssh-key authentication.
Setting up FTP
If you do not have freedom to choose an alternative see one of the below guides which best matches your operating system
The ports that FTP uses must be open on your VM (see OpenStack#Security Groups for information about opening these ports into your VM). FTP uses port 21 to initiate file transfer requests, but the actual transfer can take place on a randomly chosen port above port 1025, though the details of this can vary depending on the mode with which FTP operates in, for example Port 20 can also be involved (see this article for more details on ports used by FTP). This means that to allow FTP access on your VM you must open port 21 and very likely also ports 1025 and above. This large range of open ports is part of the reason other protocols are preferred to FTP.