10.2. Configuring the wu-ftp Server

According to my observations, the most widely used Linux FTP server is the Washington University FTP (wu-ftp) server. It is included in the main Linux distributions, including Red Hat and its clones . If you have one of these distributions, the server can be installed with packages during the operating system installation, and all you will have to do is configure the service properly. If you don't have an FTP server installed, you can easily install it from an RPM (for a Red Hat system) or another archive.

Modern distributions contain a graphical utility for configuring the FTP server, named kwuftpd. It is launched by selecting the System/kwuftpd menu sequence from the KDE main menu. The utility's main window is shown in Fig. 10.4. However, as usual, I will consider fine-tuning using configuration files. Once you know how to configure the FTP service using the configuration files, you will have no problems doing this using the kwuftpd utility.

Figure 10.4: The main window of the kwuftpd utility

The configuration information for the FTP server is contained in the following six files:

ftpaccess Information specifying access rights to the server, the FTP users, and the main security settings.
ftpservers Information specifying virtual FTP servers.
ftpusers Information specifying users explicitly forbidden access to the FTP server.
ftphosts Information specifying access rights to the server for certain hosts . Access can be both allowed and denied .
ftpgroups Information describing FTP groups.
ftpconversion Information for configuring on-the-fly file conversions.