FTP Server Software

There are kinds of software products for FTP server. The server administrator should choose the appropriate one in consideration of security and reliability where the authors respond quickly to security issues or bugs, performance to handle necessary concurrent connections, easiness in management and maintenance at server side, compliance with RFC959, and convenience from the user view.

The following software products are predominant examples in diffusion and useful features.

Be sure to install the most recent version of the software and to apply most recent patches to it, whichever product you choose.

1 wu-ftpd (http://www.wu-ftpd.org/)

The "wu-ftpd" had merits of having functions for archiving and compressing entire elements under a directory and running on many supported platforms. The last version of the "wu-ftpd" is 2.6.2 released in Nov 2001. Since the "wu-ftpd" used to be most commonly used server software, information on security flaw and its patch is adequately released to support a great number of the implementers. But "wu-ftpd" is being taken over by some other server software recently.

2 proftpd (http://www.proftpd.org/)

Since the "proftpd" runs as a configurable non-privileged process in stand-alone mode in order to decrease chances of attacks, which might exploit its "root" abilities, it is more secure than other server software, which runs in privileged mode like "wu-ftpd".

The "proftpd" has single main configuration file similar to "Apache". Therefore directives and directive groups in the file are intuitive to an administrator who has ever used the "Apache" Web server. This feature provides easy and flexible configuration.

3 vsftpd (http://vsftpd.beasts.org/)

The vsftpd is a high performance and secure FTP server for Unix like systems, including Linux. The name "vsftpd" stands for Very Secure ftpd. Literally its significant features of security are emphasized. Other good features are that it is extremely fast and that it does not consume a lot of resources.

Lately RedHat, one of most famous Linux distributors, has replaced "proftpd" by "vsftpd" as standard FTP server software included in their distributions. Major Linux/Unix distributions include “vsftpd” as its default FTP server. The “vsftpd” has been upgraded to version 2 since July 2004, including TSL/SSL features to support FTPS service.

4 Internet Information server (IIS)

Microsoft provides the Internet Information Server (IIS) as an optional module of the Windows Servers. The IIS has capability of server functions including the FTP.

The IIS 5.0, which is provided with Windows Server 2000, is not recommended as it is automatically installed with other additional modules in default, may include undesirable flaws unconsciously. On the contrary, the IIS 6.0, which is provided with Windows Server 2003 but not installed in default, is recommended as it is considered for security well.

5 GuildFTPd (http://www.guildftpd.com/)

  The guildFTPd is a free FTP server, which works on the Windows platforms. Although some free ftp daemons are limited its usage only for personal purposes, the guildFTPd is allowed to use by non-profit users including government.

  The guildFTPd provides capability of ordinary FTP daemon running on the UNIX like platforms, including user and user-group managements, IP filtering, connection control, change root, throughput control, etc.

  The most recent version of the guildFTPd is 0.999.14 (26-May-2006) as of June 2006.

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