How to setup FTP...

[syed_17]

Hello friends,

I want to setup data to be accessible thro FTP over internet.You are all welcome to comeup with all ideas about setting up FTP. its prerequisites,etc ...Step by step procedures will be highly appreciated.

[Duncan Morris]

Hello Qadri,

welcome to the OpenVMS itrc forum.

Are you sure that your question relates to an OpenVMS system? Your previous questions appear to have been for other operating systems.

If you are using OpenVMS, then it would help if you described whether you have Vax, Alpha, or Itanium systems, and which version of OpenVMS and UCX or TCP/IP you are using.

[syed_17]

Wow!!!!It could be the quickest reply I got ever from anyone over a forum. I am definitely not sure where exactly I should place this query...Since upon searching ftp in forums, I found this ftp related query in OpenVms forum,thought I should go with it..Confusion regretted.

[Duncan Morris]

Quadri,

in the SEARCH box at the top of this page, try entering

ftp access

and then work through some of the threads that come up. Even if you don't find the answer you are looking for, then you will surely find the best place for asking!

All the best,
Duncan

[Thomas Ritter]

Quadri, our view.
1) Never allow direct FTP access to your Production hosts. Never.
2) use a middle box or a FTP Drop Box for moving files from outside the network to inside the network. We use a small alpha.
3) A dedicated FTP drop can be made very secure .
4) We use decnet from production to the dropbox and from outside the only protocol allowed is ftp. The dropbox sits behind a firewall. Decnet is by far the best way to manage files on the internal network on remote nodes. Any files which need to move from the dropbox are done under full and exclusive control of the production hosts. Everything is logged and audited.

This is a simple solution to implement and your auditors will love you for it.

My AUD 2 cents.

[Arch_Muthiah]

Quadri,

This may be usefull...
http://www.med.nyu.edu/rcr/rcr/dcl_ftp.html


Archunan

[Willem Grooters]

Thomas:

The second may be true but the first most definitely isn't: you need a second (small)m machine and it must talk DECNet - which limits to DECNET IV if Windows or Linux, or must be VMS if DECet-Plus/OSI/V.

Yet, I agree the general idea.

Quadri:
The way FTP works on VMS is quite stragt forward. Access over FTP will login onto the user's login directory and will set all logicals. Therefore, Thomas is right: there will be full access to any location the user would normally have access to - for the same access mode he will usually have. In general that is a bad idea.

If your requirement is to allow read access to specific files by anyone, consider anonymous FTP. Enableling that on VMS will create a complete user environment (account, login directory, all other files and protections) for you. Any other location but that login directory (and everything below that) is inaccessable. You can protect any of the accessible directories and files for unauthorised write activity, so creating new directories and placing files can be made impossible - unless you specified a location where files can be uploaded, and just on that one, files can be placed (and that means the user will be able to create directories as well (since a directory is a file as well).
I use this on my "production" server, since I don't have a spare one I can use for this (it would be a good idea anyway to have FTP access separated from the normal server - I agree with that)

If your requirement is the access by some, specific users, do something similar using a specific account - a copy of "anonymous"? and set it up as above. It may help to create a proxy for that user from specific machines, eventually, mapped to "anonymous" - that's just an idea to be investigated, I don't know if that would work.

Willem

[Thomas Ritter]

... some good information here deserving some points.