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Alternatives to Wu.FTPD?

Posted by Cliff on from the replacing-the-old-workhorse dept.

Another representative of Clan Anonymous Coward wanted suggestions on the following: "Whats a good FTP server to use now-a-days? Since the recent decline of the once used everwhere wu-ftpd some new products have popped up . But who is testing them for security. I was looking at BeroFTPd and ProFTPd but they seem to be very slow getting out of beta stages. Are they trustworthy ? What other freeware alternatives are there ? "

5 comments

  1. OpenBSD's ftpd by sighup · · Score: 1

    Assuming you're not already using OpenBSD, there's a port of their ftpd to Linux. Get it at http://www.eleves .ens.fr:8080/home/madore/programs/#prog_ftpd-BSD. There's been some patches from the OpenBSD folks for their ftpd since the port, but they apply pretty cleanly. My only beef is that the Linux port doesn't include 'ls' in the ftpd binary. I'm trying to fix that, but it's not turning out to be as simple as planned.

    It doesn't have all the bells and whistles that ProFTPD has, but it's probably a lot more secure.

    To give you some idea of the features, the man page is here.

  2. For now, just say no to ProFTPD by Falsch+Freiheit · · Score: 1

    ProFTPD has been having a number of significant security problems. Otherwise it's a fine piece of software, though. I'd stay away from it for now.

    See:
    http://freshmeat.net/news/1999/02/12/918825768.h tml
    http://freshmeat.net/news/1999/08/31/936140949.h tml
    http://freshmeat.net/news/1999/09/17/937609465.h tml
    http://www.suse.de/security/announcements/suse-s ecurity-announce-17.txt

    (note that SuSE has currently dropped it from their distribution.)

    Personally, given that it's had more than one different security problem pop up in a relatively short time, I'd wait till they fix the existing bugs and then give it another month to see if any other bugs pop up before using it. (But, then, my need to worry at all about any kind of FTP service dissappeared last week and is unlikely to return.)

    1. Re:For now, just say no to ProFTPD by PigleT · · Score: 1

      Hmmm, funny. I was going to recommend proftpd, as at least it works; of course there's always ncftpd instead - a search on freshmeat.net should find plenty of ftpds though :)

      --
      ~Tim
      --
      .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
      Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
  3. stick with wuftpd by Zurk · · Score: 1

    beroftpd has had some serious security problems too. try and get the wuftpd you use compiled with the stack scanner (available free/GPL - forget its name) and use securelinux kernels only.

  4. other alternatives by dsaljurator · · Score: 1

    there is a nice freeware daemon called glftpd, available from www.glftpd.org. It's mostly used by warez kiddies i think, judging by it's feature list, and it's not open source, but you might want to have a look at it anyway.