FTP Server Program

The Golden Shield Project or the Great Firewall of China blocks a lot of websites that are considered harmful or a threat. Some of the popular file sharing websites are blocked, making file sharing very difficult. If you are looking for a storage solution that isn't blocked by China, check out SmartFile's storage service.

Many people try to bypass China's firewall in order to share files. However, this can be cumbersome. You need to install programs, look for proxies or edit system files. SmartFile offers a simple solution for sharing files with people in China. You don't have to worry about dead links or intercepted data. Our online media storage service also offers great features like FTP access, API access, multiple users, file permissions, online file zipping/unzipping and secure file encryption.

You can also use our service as a backup solution. Your files are safe from damage caused by hardware or software issues since your files are stored in our remote servers. Even if your office network or computer system crashes, you can use another computer to access your files.

Try our service today by signing up for our free trial. You get 14-days of unrestricted service to give you ample time to evaluate the features.

Logistics involves the proper management of the flow of various goods and services. Given the customer’s specific objectives, everything must be done with utmost efficiency. From the planning down to the execution, monitoring the movement and placement of the goods/services must be implemented the best way possible.

This is the reason Logistic companies rely on large online storage to help them manage data. Online data storage helps even small logistics companies accomplish secure file sharing and storage. By adding users and setting permissions, Logistic companies are able to share files with their clients without worrying about unsecured file transfers and file size limitations email services have.

You can get all these and more from SmartFile. You will be able to manage your files conveniently and back them up in our secure and reliable servers as often as you need to. This can be done via any web browser or FTP programs. Other features you will get are unlimited number of users connected to your account, timed-user sessions and the ability to set file and folder permissions.

Improve the business processes of your Logistic company. Let us help you manage your data. Sign up for our 14-day free trial today.

Online data storage allows data to be accessed through a website panel or through an FTP client. You don't need to install anything or buy additional hardware to use this type of service. This can be very convenient for businesses with limited office space for additional hardware and network servers. Files are also securely exchanged through an SSL encrypted connection. It is also possible to set folder restrictions and several levels of user limitations. This prevents unauthorized access to important business files.

Because of the many benefits of this service, a lot of businesses have been using it for effective file management. This goes without saying that this service has a very high earning potential. If you want to increase your income, why not be an online data storage reseller?

SmartFile allows you to sell storage solutions to your customers with our Backup Private Label reseller program. You can have your own domain name with a custom logo and branding under your business name. Billing, order processing and account management are all handled within your website. This makes it easy to integrate the service to your current business processes.

Try our service for free for 14 days and share your own story to your prospective clients about how easy file management has been for you when you started using an online data storage service.

It’s very important to choose the best File Transfer Protocol software for managing your company’s files. This is even more critical if you are doing business online since your FTP server is responsible for storing and managing all your files. If the server fails, your website and business consequently fails. Your website isn't able to access files needed for your store’s shopping cart and cash register system to work. These are just some of the consequences you could suffer when you choose the wrong company that uses bad FTP software.

Choosing the right FTP service provider doesn't have to be difficult. While you may find a lot of free FTP programs online, you shouldn't rely on these programs to cater to all your company's needs. Consider the range of features offered by different providers. Never sign up with a service that can’t offer automation and scheduling. Look for a service provider that will allow you to quickly and easily set up sub-accounts for other users as well as configure access permission for each and every sub-account in your group.

Find out other exciting features you can enjoy with SmartFile's online file management service. Take advantage of our free 14-day trial now.

Purchasing disk space from an Internet-based storage system guarantees that your important business files are accessible wherever you go for as long as you have Internet connection. This is now a necessity for most businesses. Because of the demand for this type of service, it can be a profitable solution you can offer to your existing clients.

Let your clients take advantage of an online storage service. We are offering a reseller program so you can offer storage solutions to your clients. Your clients can now enjoy secure data storage with SSL and muti-level file and folder security. The online file server can be accessed through a custom branded website or through a FTP client.

Our Private Label Program allows full integration of our services to your system. You can process orders, payments and manage accounts within your system. Your billing system can also be integrated with our system so packages purchased will be directed automatically to your system. You can also manage accounts and check user statuses. This makes it easy for your business to manage and process storage solutions without having to go to another system.

If you want additional revenue for your business, be a SmartFile reseller today and offer online storage services to your customers.

File transfer protocol or FTP continues to be the simplest and most efficient way to transfer files from one computer or account to another. It was first utilized in the 1970s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT. In the early days, FTP had also been the preferred method for downloading heavy files.

In the field of computing and information technology, the use of the word ‘protocol’ always refers to standards or rules prescribed to govern interaction between systems. In the case of file transfer protocol, this simply means that they provide the necessary rules to standardize sharing or transfer of files.

FTP and HTTP should not be confused with each other. With hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP), server data is transferred to your computer through our web browser. With file transfer protocol, it can go both ways.

Having backup data online is critical when you're managing websites, online businesses, or maintaining software programs of any sort. If you're in charge of website maintenance, having an account on a file sharing site that can automate FTP download would be greatly beneficial to your work. With this type of service, you're be able to save yourself a lot of time as you don't have to perform repetitive tasks. Once you've entered the necessary commands, the server will automatically perform the required tasks whenever you've uploaded or modified files.

Take advantage of SmartFile's FTP services by signing up for our 14-day free trial today.

If you’re looking for a file transfer protocol upload program for your website or business, make sure to look for a program offering the features listed below.

User-friendly Interface
The interface must be something that even first-time users or those new to FTP would not have any difficulties using.

Web-based Transfer
The service must allow you to quickly and easily upload files to the server via your web browser. If it works with all the commonly used browsers like Windows Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox then consider that as an additional advantage.

Built-in Editor
The best programs also allow clients to modify HTML and other types of files with use of their built-in editor. This would allow you to manage your files anywhere anytime and using any computer or any other Internet-ready device.

Upload and Download Speeds
The service must also be able to retrieve and display files quickly. For this to happen, your preferred FTP hosting website should have a sufficient number of Internet pipes and data centers working with their system.

SmartFile can cater to all your online data management needs. Try our free14-day trial now and find out how easy and convenient it is to manage files online.

There may be times you need to backup or access your files in a computer with limited capabilities. Knowing the common prompts will help you get your task done easily. The command prompt has a built in FTP program that you can use in a windows machine to access your FTP account.

In order to connect to your account, open command prompt and enter the command ftp <yourftpsite.com> then press enter. Once you’re connected, the prompt will ask for your username. Type in your username then hit enter. After that, enter your password. You should get a response from the server that says “FTP server ready”. Once you’re connected, you can start managing your files using the command prompt. Here are some common FTP server commands you should know.

• cd – change directory
• delete – delete
• mdelete – delete multiple files
• dir – list contents
• get – receive a file
• mget – receive multiple files
• mkdir – make a directory
• put – send a file
• mput – send multiple files
• disconnect – terminate FTP session

The windows command prompt allows you to connect to an FTP server and manage your files. If you are looking for a secure FTP online storage, sign up for SmartFile's 14 day free trial today.

    We have already gone through a few of that FTP programs that we have tested with SmartFile. The newest program I have tested is Auto FTP Manager. The look of the program is pretty standard issue; however, it does offer several unique features.

The first is the server-to-server connection. Most FTP clients only allow you to connect from your local PC to the server. In this case you would need to connect to the server you are requesting files from and download them to your local machine. Once downloaded, you could connect to the second server and upload the files. This can be very time consuming depending on the amount of files you have. Auto FTP allows you to make a connection to server 2 from server 1 and copy files directly between them without making a local copy. This is my favorite feature of the program.

Next is the ability to set up profiles and use rules and filters to automate the file transfer process. An example is that I can create rules so that when I upload files to the server, it will automatically delete them from my local machine when it is finished. Also once the transfer is complete I can move the files to a specific backup folder on the server. This can all be set up to be done automatically everytime I transfer files.

It also has the capabilities to schedule transfers. Using its command line interface and the integrated scheduler it can run as a scheduled task and automatically upload files based on the name, modification date, or file type. In that respect it can almost run as a backup utility. It can run at specific times (hourly, daily, etc.) to FTP files automatically.

There are several other useful features Auto FTP offers. There are only two drawbacks that I see. The first is that it runs on Windows only. It doesnt have a multi platform install like some other FTP programs. The second is the supported protocols. While it does support FTP and FTPS, that is where it stops. It does not have the option to use FTPES which is the secure protol SmartFile uses for FTP.

Overall this is a really good ftp program. I would definately recommed this for a Windows users needing a substantial FTP program.

In a previous post, I explained why PASV mode is the preferred method to connect to an FTP server. That is all well and good, but how do you actually USE PASV mode?

The FTP client that ships with Windows does not support PASV mode. Google will tell you that it does, by using the raw command. However, this is not true, you cannot perform PASV connections using the Windows FTP client. It can only do active connections. So if you are behind a firewall that does not allow this, how do you do command line FTP?

Command line FTP is useful for scheduled operations often performed from a script. On Windows, this might be a batch file executed by the Windows Task Scheduler. Well, if you wish to automate a file transfer in this way, you will almost certainly have to download a third party FTP client that supports PASV data channels.

One FTP client that is available for this task is ncFTP. For uploading or downloading a file inside a script, you can use the ncftpget and ncftpput programs respectively.

For example, to download a file from an FTP server using PASV mode, you can use ncftpget with the following options.

ncftpget -F -u <username> -p <password> <site name>.smartfile.com /path/to/remote C:pathtolocal

SmartFile provides a backup client for Windows. However, if you have Linux servers, it is just as important to back them up as well. Since SmartFile provides FTP access to your space, this task can be easily accomplished with some tools you likely already have installed.

This article will detail the steps to perform a simple, safe, encrypted backup directly to the SmartFile servers. At the end of the article a script will be provided that you can simply install onto your system to perform nightly backups.

Required Tools

Tar is historically for creating Tape ARchives. Thus backing up to a tape would usually involve using tar. Tar has many features including compression and is great for performing backups of Linux systems. Not only can it write to a tape, but also to a file on disk. Further, it can write the archive to stdout, so it can be fed into another program.

OpenSSL is an open source library and command line application that is capable of performing myriad encryption tasks. It is basically the swiss army knife of encryption for Linux systems. For our purposes, we will use it to encrypt our backup file before sending it to the FTP server. By default openssl will read input from stdin and output to stdout. This is perfect for our purposes.

cURL is a network client that is URL driven. It allows uploading or downloading to or from FTP or HTTP servers. For us, the main feature that cURL provides is that you can stream data directly to a file on an FTP server. Let me explain, while most FTP clients will allow you to upload a file from your file system to an FTP server this requires that the file you wish to send to the FTP server already exist on your disk. What is wanted for our backup is a way to “stream” the backup file directly to the FTP server without touching the local disk. cURL provides this with the -T option. If -T is passed – as the file, then the file data is read from stdin.

Now that we are familiar with the tools, let’s take a look at how we will use them all together. Linux allows multiple commands to be chained together by piping the output (stdout) of one command on to the input (stdin) of another command. The | or pipe character is used for this purpose. Thus at a high level, we will be doing the following.

tar | openssl | curl

Tar will create the backup of our system, openssl will then encrypt that backup and curl will transfer it to the FTP server, all without creating any temporary files that we would otherwise need to be cleaned up later.

All that remains is to determine what parameters each of the above commands needs to be given to get the behavior we want.

Tar – Parameters.

To create an archive, you use the c option. To compress the archive using Bzip2, you use the j option. Since we want to back up the entire system, our tar command thus far is.

tar cj /

By omitting any option to save the archive to disk, tar will by default output it to stdout. This allows us to pass the archive data to the next program in our chain without saving it to disk.

There are certain directories within your Linux system that should not be backed up. Some examples are:

• /proc – The proc file system is provided by the Linux kernel and contains information about running programs.
• /sys – The sys file system is provided by the kernel and contains information about hardware.
• /dev – The dev file system consists of device nodes, which represent Linux device drivers.

Backing up the above directories would be folly, as they are provided by the kernel, and some of them (/dev/zero) are actually infinite in size. So, the second set of parameters we will pass to tar will exclude these file systems.
tar cj / --exclude=/proc --exclude=/dev --exclude=/sys

You may also wish to exclude /mnt, as generally you will have other file systems mounted there. These may be remote file systems that are already being backed up via other means. Of course, /mnt may contain file systems that you wish to back up. Your system configuration will dictate your choice here.

OpenSSL – Parameters.

We want openssl to perform encryption, thus we pass it the enc option. Also, I have opted to use the aes-256 algorithm in cbc mode, so we must pass that as well. Finally, openssl requires a key to perform our encryption. This key will be derived from a passphrase, this derivative procedure will use a salt value, so we also provide that option. We will store the passphrase in a file, so that openssl can retrieve it from that file.

openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -pass file:/etc/backup-key

And we can create the key by doing the following.

echo 'This is my backup key!' > /etc/backup-key
chmod 400 /etc/backup-key

Of course, you are well-advised to use something other than the example key above.

cURL – Parameters.

Now, the final step in our backup procedure is to actually transfer the file to SmartFile. We will do this using cURL and the FTP protocol. cURL is driven by URLs, so we must provide one.

curl ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

This tells curl to connect to www.smartfile.com and move into the backup directory. However, if the backup directory does not exist, curl will fail. Thus we will ask curl to create it for us if it does not exist.

curl --ftp-create-dirs ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

Now, as I alluded to before, we want curl to upload the data that it receives from it’s stdin. This is achieved by using the -T option like so.

curl --ftp-create-dirs -T - ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

If we want to use SSL, there are a couple of other options to provide. I suggest skipping SSL if you are already encrypting the backup file. However, if you want to use SSL, you would use the following parameters.

curl --ftp-create-dirs --ftp-ssl --ftp-ssl-reqd --insecure -T - ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

We are almost done, the final bit of information that curl needs is a username and password. We could have provided it as part of the URL, but that would expose our credentials to anyone snooping on the machine while the backup is running. It is safer to place the credentials into a file and instruct curl to retrieve them from the file. cURL is capable of doing this using a .netrc file. You can create the .netrc file like so.

echo machine www.smartfile.com login <username> password <password> > ~/.netrc
chmod 400 ~/.netrc

Of course, replace <username> and <password> with your username and password respectively. Now we instruct cURL to use our new .netrc file.

curl --ftp-create-dirs --ftp-ssl --ftp-ssl-reqd --insecure --netrc -T - ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

Putting it all together.

Now that you understand the basic building blocks of our backup to FTP solution. Please allow me provide you with a working script. This script was written and tested on CentOS 5.4. Some of the utilities used are out-of-date, for example, the version of curl available from the CentOS repositories uses some deprecated options, on other distributions, you may need to make modifications to these options. You will need to edit the configuration section of the script if you want to customize the behavior.

To install and use this backup script follow the steps below.

Download the script in the following location and ensure it is executable.
wget http://www.smartfile.com/downloads/smartfile-backup.sh -O /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh
Customize the configuration section.
Create your key and .netrc files as directed above.
Finally, schedule it to run with cron. The example below will run at midnight every night.
crontab -e
0 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh
You can also run the script manually to ensure it works properly.

/bin/bash -x /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh

Restoring from a backup.

To restore the backup, or to retrieve files from the backup you can follow the steps below.

1. Download the backup file.
2. Decrypt the backup file.
3. Use tar to extract what you need.

Download the backup file.

You can either use the SmartFile web interface or FTP to retrieve the file.

Decrypt the backup file.

You can use OpenSSL to decrypt the file. The following command line would do the trick.

openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -salt -pass pass:'This is my backup key!' -in full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2 -out full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2.dec

Use tar to extract what you need.

You can either extract the entire archive or a portion of it. Below are commands to perform either task. For more information, read the tar man page..

mkdir /tmp/restore
tar xjf full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2.dec -C /tmp/restore

mkdir /tmp/restore
tar xjf full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2.dec -C /tmp/restore /path/to/file

** Note **
You may receive the following warning during extraction:

bzip2: (stdin): trailing garbage after EOF ignored

This seems harmless, you can get rid of it by either writing the archive to disk before transfer or using gzip instead of bzip2. The archive still decompresses fine, but tar is apparently outputting some additional garbage when using bzip2 and outputting to stdout. I personally still using bzip2 and stdout, as the advantages (greater compression ratio, no temp disk space required) outweigh the disadvantages.

Let’s face it, most people in Information Technology love control. Control over systems, control over data, and most importantly control over YOU. I’m not suggesting these are bad characteristics to possess when you are trying to protect your company’s most crucial asset, such as your data. Let’s face it, I would be a little nervous if the thing that kept me gainfully employed was taken away from me because it was cheaper and easier than having it in-house. This often creates a problem when a person on the business side of the company needs to make a decision based on the limited amount of information he or she is getting from IT.

This article is written to outline the expected costs involved in getting your FTP solution in place, thus giving you the facts when it comes to making an important business decision. There are several ways to go about configuring an FTP server, below is the most common:

1. Hardware ($2500)
Price ranges on processor speed and how much hard drive space you need. Here are the specs of a slimmed down server:

• Dual Xeon 1.83Ghz Processors
• Windows Server Web Edition
• 1 Terabyte of storage
• Raid 5 (For hard drive redundancy)
• 4 Gigs of Memory
• 3 Year ProSupport

• Serv-U ($199-$999)
• GlobalScape ($696 – $1,995)
• FileZilla – (FREE)

• Configure Windows
• Purchase SSL (If security is a concern)
• Configure Network 

                   - IP addresses
                   - Hostnames
                   - Firewall Provisioning

• Configure FTP software
• Configure Backups 

                 - Create user accounts 
                 - Create directories
                 - Create file system permissions
                 - FTP server permissions

5. Support (Ongoing)
Must have tech-savvy person on staff to do the following:

• Manage
• Backup
• Troubleshoot problems
• Apply patches to server
• Upgrade
• Monitor

It’s easy to say that you can spend $5000 in creating an FTP server that people can use, not to mention ongoing costs. Cost aside, it will still not have features like custom branding, a web interface that allows anyone to upload/download a file, and a way for any non-IT person to administer.

Before making the decision to bring FTP in-house, I would highly suggest giving SmartFile a try (for as little as a $108.00 a year). Who knows, you might even make your IT person happy.
A Dell PowerEdge server