FAQ / Helpful FTP Links

Wow...for a moment there I almost forgot I was a moderator of this forum, but I did help to create it, so I'm going to help with its up-keep. The goal of this sticky is pretty traightforward: to keep a nice list of FTP programs and utilities.
NOTE: This is not a support thread. If you need help with something posted here, please start a new thread. Please only add to this thread if you have something that you think others would find useful. Thank you.

# 1 : What are some good FTP clients that I can use to transfer files to a remote computer using FTP?

Some of my personal favorites include gFTP on Unix/Unix-like (hereafter referred to as "*nix") operating systems (GNU/Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, et al.), and FileZilla on a Windows/Win32 workstation.



# 2 : What if I want to run my own FTP server? How Would I go about doing that?

I would recommend vsFTPd for *nix systems, or FileZilla for Win32 systems. (FileZilla has both a client and a server.) Note that I only recommend the FileZilla server on the bias of having used its excellent client. I have never used the server component.

I recommend WS_FTP for windows and Ser-U for serving on WIndows. WS ftp has easy to use transfer manager that will resume transfers with ease, and serv-u has many options and makes it easy to create and manage users and security.

For *nix users, I would generally reccommend against running a ftp server if your only desire is to transfer files to your computer from a remote location. FTP is inherently insecure because it sends passwords in clear text, meaning that anyone could potentially intercept your password.

Instead of running a FTP server for personal use, I would suggest using sFTP which is FTP over a secure shell (SSH).

In that case, KDE users may be better off with the fish protocol. It is an internal KDE protocal for accessing other machines via SSH in Konqueror (and other KDE apps) as if they were local.

For instance, I can type the address of my Fedora box into the address bar of Konqi on my Kubuntu box: fish://192.168.123.101 and browse that box as if it were a local mounted harddrive. Opening files and saving them with Kate is just as if they were local (but a bit slower).

I administer my server 5000 km away like this. It really is that great.

I am a filezilla user, and this one's rock!

Hi,

I hope my post is useful.

At the moment, I'm using FlashFXP on Win32, and I really like it because the whole appearance is really user-friendly, what I mean by this, is that it has no millions of worthless buttons and all that extra stuff you see in some programs, and I've noticed it's also faster than my previous FTP clients.

FlashFXP homepage

About CuteFTP, it's also user-friendly, clean appearance and works like it has to, but one thing I didn't like was it disconnected every 60 seconds (as default, you can probably change this from options! (I'm not sure )) it also felt like little slow for me

CuteFTP homepage (cuteFTP is also available for Mac OSX!)


For serving, like sunthief also mentioned, I like Serv-U as well
Easy-to-use and manage

Serv-U homepage


Screenshots:

FlashFXP


CuteFTP


Serv-U

Hi,

heres some useful (ohpefully) FTP Links.

FTP RFC (Request For comment)
Anonymous FTP FAQ
FTP Protocol Resource Center
Free ftp/sftp clients
FTP 101. A begineers guide

Displeaser

This tool comes handy if you want to move files between FTPs bypassing your computer.

directransfer[dot]net

Has many other useful functions like free ftp account to host files, http links to files, superb free image hosting, remote uploads and direct downloads.