What is FileZilla? FileZilla is cross-platform FTP software. FileZilla is available for free
as open source software. It contains both a Client and Server. Support for FTP, SFTP,
and FTPS Supports Windows, Linux, and Mac. Features include Upload and download bandwidth
limits, Compression, Encryption, Message logging, Let’s download and install the Filezilla
Server. Open a web browser like “Internet Explorer”. In the “Address Bar”, enter
“http://filezilla-project.org/” Under “Quick download links”, click the “Download
FileZilla Server” button. Under “Windows”, click the download link. On the “Download
Information Bar”, click the “Run” button. This will download the file and then automatically
start the installer. The FileZilla installer will open up. On the “License Agreement”
screen, read the license agreement, and then click the “I Agree” button. On the “Choose
Components” screen, leave “Standard” selected, and then click the “Next” button.
On the “Choose Install Location” screen, click the “Next” button. On the “Startup
settings” screen, leave “Install as service started with Windows” selected. Under “Please
choose the port”, choose the port you want to use for the listening port. This is the
port to connect to the admin interface. We will leave the default of “14147”. Click
the “Next” button. On the “Startup Settings” screen, leave the default of “Start if user
logs on, apply to all users” selected, and click the “Install” button. On the “Installation
Complete” screen, click the “Close” button. We left the option checked to automatically
start the server management password, which by default is blank. Leave the defaults selected
and click the “OK” button. You will then see it is “Logged on”. Let’s now setup
the server. Click the “Edit” menu, then “Settings”. “General settings”. The
default settings are fine for this screen. Looking by “Listen on these ports” we
can see that it is set to use port “21”. This is the standard FTP port. “Welcome
Message”. Here you set the message users will get when they log onto the server. Let’s
enter a simple message of “Welcome to my server”. “IP Bindings”. Here you can
set which IP addresses on the server it will bind the server to. By default it will use
“*” to represent all adapters. “IP Filter”. This is used to block out specific IP addresses.
If you have problem users or hackers trying to penetrate your server, you can block them
out here. “Miscellaneous”. Let’s place a check next to “Start Minimized”. This
will start the server directly to the system tray. You won’t have to close down the application
when it pops up each time you start the computer. “Admin Interface Settings”. Here you can
set allowed and denied IP addresses or ranges. By default all addresses are allowed. Let’s
click to select “Change admin password:”. Enter the password twice. Here will will just
use “password” for the password. “Logging”. Its a good idea to keep track of what is happening
on your FTP server. Let’s click to select “Enable logging to file”. If you have
a low usage server leaving “Log all to ‘FileZilla Server.log” selected is probably fine. You
can select “Limit log file size to” a reasonable size, and then it will split off
to another file. This helps view very large files that would hang up your system. If you
have a high usage server you will probably want to select “Use a different logfile
each day”. The log files are all stored in the FileZilla installation folder inside
a folder named “Logs”. By default this is “C:\Program Files (x86)\FileZilla Server\Logs”.
“Speed Limits”. This is where you can set maximum download and upload speeds for
the server. If the server is heavily used and you want to make sure that there is bandwidth
available for all your other Internet needs you can limit the speeds. “Autoban”. You
may want to enable Autoban to prevent someone from hacking into your server. Click the “OK” button to apply the changes.
Let’s close out of the admin interface and log back in with our new password. Now we
could just create a user to access the system, but we are going to also create a group with base settings for all
our users. Click the “Edit” menu, then select “Groups”. To create a new group,
click the “Add” button. On the “Add user group” window, enter a name, and click
the “OK” button. We’ll call this one “Normal Users”. “General”. Make sure
“Enable access for users inside group” is selected. “Shared folders”. This is
where we set the folders we want to give the users access to. Under the “Directories”
pane, click the “Add” button. A “Browse for Folder” window will open. Browse to
and select the folder you want to share. I browse to the “X” drive, “FTP”, and
then click “Normal Users” to highlight it blue. Click the “OK” button to select
the folder. We only have one folder in the list so it is already our home folder. This
is the folder the users will be dropped into when they log on. There is an “H” next
to the listing showing it is the home folder. If you have more than one you would click
the “Set as home dir” button. For each directory we have permissions for the “Files”
and “Directories”. By default users can list the contents of the directory, and sub
directories, as well as the ability to read the files. You can give the users the ability
to “Create” or “Delete” directories, as well as “Write” or “Delete” files.
“Speed Limits”. We already saw where we could set speed limits for the server as a
whole. Here we can set download and upload speed limits for this user group. “IP Filter”.
Here you can set addresses not allowed to access the server when logging into this group.
Once everything is setup correctly, click the “OK” button. All that did was create
a group. There isn’t an actual account we can use to log into the server next. To do
this we need to create a new “User”. Click the “Edit” menu, then select “Users”.
We can see that the “Users” menu that opens is exactly the same as the “Groups”
window we looked at previously. Under “Users”, click the “Add” button. The “Add user
account” window will open. Enter a name for the new user. Let’s name this user “User1”.
Under where it says “User should be a member of the following group”, we can see it currently
says “none”. Leaving it set to none will create a new user that is not in any group.
This means that all settings for this user come from the user settings. If we click the
drop down we can see our group “Normal Users”. Let’s select it. This will use all the settings
to “User1” that we setup in the “Normal Users” group. We can then add or remove
additional settings on the user level. Click the “OK” button to create the user. If
we look in the boxes on the “General” tab we can see that the boxes are filled with
blue. This means that they are inheriting the permissions from their part group, which
is “Normal Users”. If we click the box next to “Enable account” one time it will
deselect it. If we click it one more time, it will show a check. The check means we are
overriding the group settings and are enabling it at the user level. The blank box means
we are overriding the group settings and disabling it at the user level. Let’s click it one
more time to get back to the blue box, which are taking on the group settings. Every user
should have a password. Click to select “Password:”. Enter a password. I will user password again.
“Shared folders”. In addition to the directories we have in the group settings we can add additional
folders. Let’s click the “Add” button under “Shared Folders”. On the “Browse
for Folder” window that opens, browse to and select the folder to share. I will share
out a folder in the “X:\FTP\” folder called “Private”. This is going to be a user
with special access to this private folder. Let’s give them full rights by enabling
everything. Now the user has access to this new folder, but would not be able to navigate
out of the home folder into the “Private” folder. To be able to change to this folder
we need to set an alias for the folder. Right-click on the shared folder and select “Edit Aliases”.
We will enter “/PrivateLink” for the alias name. It is essential that you have the “/” or
it won’t work. If you want you can also adjust “Speed Limits” and “IP Filters”.
Now let’s just click the “OK” button to create the new user. Let’s connect to
the server with the built in Windows FTP client. I will be creating a tutorial about using
the FileZilla client, but for simplicity I will just use the Windows FTP Client. We’ll
click the “Start” button, “All Programs”, “Accessories”, and then select “Command
Prompt”. At the command prompt we’ll type “ftp localhost” and press enter. Here
we can see the welcome message we set before of “Welcome to my Server”. We’ll enter “User1”
for the username and “password” for the password. we are now in the home directory
from our group settings. We can’t see what folder this is on the server for use it is
just the root folder defined as “/”. let’s list the directory contents by entering “dir”
and pressing enter. Here we can see the “NormalUsers.txt” file I created so we would know we were in
the “Normal Users” folder from the group. We also have the link “PrivateLink” that
links to the “Private” folder we shared in our user settings. let’s enter that directory
with “cd PrivateLink”. List the contents again with “dir”. In this folder we can
see the “Private.txt” file showing we are in the “Private” folder. Let’s create
a new folder to test our write permissions. Enter “mkdir test”, to make a new folder
named test. Now if we enter “dir” again, we can see our test folder. Let’s back back
out to our home folder. Enter “cd ..” and press enter. If we enter “dir” again we
can see we are in the “Normal Users” folder. Let’s try to create a folder here. Enter
“mkdir test” and press enter. We get a message saying “Can’t create directory.
Permission Denied”. You should now have FileZilla downloaded and installed, a group
and user created, and have a good idea how to manage file and directory access.