Setup groups and users in FileZilla Server and connect with ftpes

Following my earlier post on how to Install and configure an FTP server, this post describes on how to setup groups and users in FileZilla.

Open the FileZilla Server console by clicking on the taskbar icon.

Choose Edit->Groups->Add

 

Create a folder on one of your drives called Filezilla. Create a subfolder called clients. After the group has been added in the FileZilla console, select the group and configure it as follows

The path will be F:\Filezilla\clients\:u

:u represents to automatically select the subfolder based on the login username.

H represents the Home folder

Eg: If you create a folder as F:\Filezilla\clients\sujeeth, then the client with username ‘sujeeth’ will be automatically be mapped to that folder and it will be that login’s home folder.

 

To create an Alias, Click on Add and give local path. Right click on the path and select Edit aliases. So when the client login, they will see a folder called website, and when they upload the files, it will be stored in C:\autopublish

 

You can set the Speed Limits and IP Filter based on your requirements. After you create the group, you follow the same procedure to add the users. Any user that is member of a group will inherit all the settings of that group.

 

After you have setup the user, you can connect using FileZilla client on the remote machine with the following syntax

ftpes://<username>:<password>@<host IP address>/

eg: ftpes://sujeeth:pa55w0rd@207.46.222.11/

You have to use ftpes protocol because you have configured the FileZilla Server to force explicit SSL as per my previous post

 

Install and Configure FTP Secure (FTPS) or FTP-SSL using FileZilla

I am going to show you how to setup an FTP Secure (FTPS protocol) on Windows Server 2003 and have your own version of FTP server rather than default ftp in IIS.

FTPS should not be confused with the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), an incompatible secure file transfer subsystem for the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. It is also different from Secure FTP, the practice of tunneling FTP through an SSH connection.

Please make sure you don’t have IIS FTP service enabled and running. If you have it running, please disable FTP service as we are going to use the same ports as a standard FTP

Download the latest version of FileZilla Server. At the time of writing, it was 0.9.33

Choose Standard install and proceed. This will install the Windows service for FileZilla and the GUI for administration.

After the Installation is completed, it is now to configuring the server. To start the Administration interface, Connect to 127.0.0.1 which is localhost on Port 10050 (you have given this during installation)

Setup your server as per the images. They are self explanatory.

We are going to have the FTP Secure to listen on port 21 which is the default FTP port.

Setup your own customised welcome message when the users logs in. Make sure you select to hide the message in log, because this might increase the log size.

Use * to bind all IP addresses on the local system. If your server has multiple IP addresses assigned, provide only the IP that you want to use

To have better control over security, Ban all IP addresses to connect and include only the IP address in the exclude list that want to connect. Separate the IP address with a space. Here I allowed google.com IP (209.85.229.103)

The next few settings are straight forward:

Enable logging to see who the usage and also enable deletion of older log files or else you will end up requiring huge disk space

Here you can set the download and upload speed limits if you wish to. Note that these limits are global settings, so they will take over individual user settings.

This is the main part where we configure an SSL certificate to set our server as FTPS. You can use a public certificate which you need to purchase. But for the demo purposes, I am going to use inbuilt certificate generator.

Provide your server IP address in the Common name

Go back to SSL/TLS settings and give the path to the generated certificate and a key password

And finally Autoban settings and we are done with Server Configuration.

Before you proceed to connect, make sure port 21, 990 and 3000-4000 are allowed on your firewall. This is very important.

In my next post, I will show how to setup groups and users in FileZilla Server and connect using FileZilla Client.

How to disable Front Panel Audio Jack / USB ports

Recently, one of my colleagues snapped his earphones in the front Audio Jack of his machine. So he tried using the Rear ones with a different headphone. But the audio wasn’t coming. So I did a bit of troubleshooting and found that, since the old earphones snapped, it left a small piece of metal in the front audio jack. So the machine thinks that the audio jack is in use and it takes over the rear jack from emitting sound.

The only way to disable the front Audio jack is to physically disconnect it. There is no BIOS or software setting to disable it.

If your machine is an old one, there might be a chance that the front Audio Jack is connected individually with a cable to the motherboard. Open the case and locate the cable and disconnect it. The front Audio jacks are simply an extension to the original back ones, but they detect the earphones and take over the rear jack.

All the latest DELL machines have the power switch, front USB ports and Audio jacks on the same circuit board connected to the mother board with a single connector. If you disconnect that, you won’t be able to switch on the machine. So that’s not an option with the new machines.

Remove the circuit board and break the Audio Jack. That’s how I fixed it :)

Note: You can always the disable any (front or rear) of the USB ports from the BIOS, but not the Audio Jack. You can completely disable the onboard Audio controller from the BIOS.