Share files over the internet

Wcool · 09-11-2009 07:46PM #1

Would anyone know about a Linux app that I can install on my home server, that would make it possible to share certain directories with other people?

Of course there is good old FTP but I would prefer something easier to explain and more transparent to use for other users.

Preferably, after setting it up, I could ask remote users to download some software that would create an extra icon in their Windows Explorer window or Ubuntu's Places equivalent that, when being clicked on, asks for a password and after that could see my drives and files that I want to share in the Explorer window, usable as a normal local file.

Some sort of dropbox where I host the dropbox server.

TCP/IP_King · 09-11-2009 07:56PM

I've used Fileman (Perl) in the past and it worked great, more for admin though.
Also nyfolder looks interesting - P2P file sharing with an easy interface.

ravydavygravy · 09-11-2009 08:12PM

Surely FTP is as simple as it gets - in windows, get them to create a new network place (ftp is supported) and they can use it like any other folder. Linux ftp integration is straightforward.

Wcool · 09-11-2009 10:47PM

Great tip about network locations, I didn't know that!

What I don't like about FTP is that it won't allow streaming, you will have to download the file first. Some secure form of samba would be nice.

But I think it is my best option sofar yes, the other suggested programs don't really are mature enough.

Snowbat · 09-11-2009 11:42PM

Take a look at WebDAV.

mod_dav setup for Apache 2.0: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_dav.html

pickarooney · 10-11-2009 11:52AM

You should be able to stream video using VLC and dyndns

Blowfish · 10-11-2009 12:39PM

pickarooney wrote: »

You should be able to stream video using VLC and dyndns

That's probably the easiest, though I'm not sure about security. Combine it with OpenVPN though and it would be better.

Another option would be using SSH -L, though that'd probably involve a bit more work.

Wcool · 10-11-2009 04:58PM

That's basically the scenario, I want to share some movies and pictures but don't want to make my family jump through hoops to browse my library, but it should still be safe enough that no one else can connect.

About VLC, afaik you can only stream 1 file, I don't think that VLC supports browsing all my files and then picking one?

Blowfish · 10-11-2009 05:13PM

Wcool wrote: »

That's basically the scenario, I want to share some movies and pictures but don't want to make my family jump through hoops to browse my library, but it should still be safe enough that no one else can connect.

About VLC, afaik you can only stream 1 file, I don't think that VLC supports browsing all my files and then picking one?

Ah ok. I haven't used it myself, but this should work.

[edit] And this for your images.

Herbal Deity · 10-11-2009 07:24PM

Out of interest, what's the problem with samba (I know very little about security, and wasn't aware it wasn't secure).

Also, I'm not sure how good an idea this is, but you could look into DAAP, I think you can share movies as well as audio. People would just have to open iTunes or Winamp or similar and connect to the share.

Wcool · 10-11-2009 09:25PM

Every article that I read says it's a security nightmare and also SMB protocol was not really intended for the internet as it is very 'chatty' and doesn't like dropped packages that much.

That jinzora link look very promising, I think that would make it easy for the client side as well, just login and browse...

Thanks a lot all for all the feedback!

pickarooney · 11-11-2009 11:26AM

I just set up jinzora to see what it was like. It only seems to handle music though, no video.

edit: I reimported as filesystem rather than tags and now I van see them.

How does one access the jinzara server from outside? I pointed my browser to http://(mydyndns).com/jinzora2 but it's not found.
Is it just a question iof opening some ports or is there more to it?

pickarooney · 16-11-2009 03:10PM

I got jinzora to work (stupidly I was just testing from within my own domain and it didn't connect, works fine from outside).

There is no way a normal home broadband connection will suffice to share video files in any kind of decent compression format via streaming unfortunately

Wcool · 16-11-2009 03:22PM

What is your upload speed? I have about 200K per second. I think it should be enough for smaller video files

Thanks for having a look, I actually went with the FTP option and explained that to the other side, it works well and once setup is a no brainer, but no streaming or picture preview.

tpotter · 16-11-2009 03:29PM

Wcool wrote: »

What is your upload speed? I have about 200K per second. I think it should be enough for smaller video files

Thanks for having a look, I actually went with the FTP option and explained that to the other side, it works well and once setup is a no brainer, but no streaming or picture preview.

While FTP is fairly easy to set up, it is not secure. This is mostly because the password is sent in plain text, so anyone that intercepts the packet can see the password. This opens up problems not just at home, but along every server you connect to along the way.

Personally, I use SSH/SCP when I need to transfer files. It is a lot more secure and it is possible to mount a directory using SSH. One downside, however, to using SSH is that it is not as fast, but I would take slower security over insecure FTP any day. Of course, I am not sure it is going to be as easy to explain as ftp, but there are clients(Cygwin) available for both Windows and Linux that can use ssh...

Blowfish · 16-11-2009 04:09PM

tpotter wrote: »

While FTP is fairly easy to set up, it is not secure. This is mostly because the password is sent in plain text, so anyone that intercepts the packet can see the password. This opens up problems not just at home, but along every server you connect to along the way.

Personally, I use SSH/SCP when I need to transfer files. It is a lot more secure and it is possible to mount a directory using SSH. One downside, however, to using SSH is that it is not as fast, but I would take slower security over insecure FTP any day. Of course, I am not sure it is going to be as easy to explain as ftp, but there are clients(Cygwin) available for both Windows and Linux that can use ssh...

Easiest is just to combine the two and use sftp. Set them up with an (extremely limited) account on the server, make sure SSH is accessible remotely and then stick Firefox and this on their machine.

Again, it won't stream content though.

tpotter · 16-11-2009 05:07PM

Blowfish wrote: »

Easiest is just to combine the two and use sftp. Set them up with an (extremely limited) account on the server, make sure SSH is accessible remotely and then stick Firefox and this on their machine.

Again, it won't stream content though.

Good point! I use ssh more to admin machines than I do to transfer files and had forgot about sftp

pickarooney · 24-11-2009 02:51PM

Has anyone got a tutorial for thickos on using SFTP? I cannot for the life of me get it to work.

Blowfish · 24-11-2009 02:59PM

As long as you have SSH set up, it should just work. Are you getting any errors on the client end or is it just not connecting?

The one thing to note is that as it's SSH based, it's port 22 it's going over, rather than 21.

Herbal Deity · 24-11-2009 03:15PM

pickarooney wrote: »

Has anyone got a tutorial for thickos on using SFTP? I cannot for the life of me get it to work.

You need to give a little more info that that, however.

I think I read a post by you where you said you were using Ubuntu, if so:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

What's the internet setup of the server/computer you want to get files off? If you're behind a router using NAT, you may need to forward port 22 to the IP of the server.

djmarkus · 24-11-2009 03:17PM

make sure

Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/ssh/sftp-server

is in your sshd_config

check that /usr/lib/ssh/sftp-server exists

Wcool · 24-11-2009 04:58PM

About the security of FTP, yes I am full aware that the password is transmitted in the open. But considering the data (a couple of read-only files and one upload directory) and the fact that I hand out usernames and passwords to a couple of friends and family, the security risk is more than acceptable. Especially as the receiving party has plenty of options to get at my files as FTP is very well established.

<RANT>
Of course I do use SSH (every day) but I find it very irritating that you need to setup Linux user accounts to use SFTP. That means chroot jails.
At the moment i use ProFTP as FTP server but I honestly hate it. Why can't I define a user template/group that defines which directories can be read/written to and then define users names and assign them to the template? Every Windows FTP server has that facility and it saves hours of work and you don't have to use system accounts to setup FTP accounts.
</RANT>

djmarkus · 24-11-2009 05:33PM

Try pure-ftpd, it has all those features.

Personally i don't see a problem with adding users for sftp, its hardly that much overhead.

pickarooney · 25-11-2009 12:26AM

djmarkus wrote: »

make sure

Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/ssh/sftp-server

is in your sshd_config

check that /usr/lib/ssh/sftp-server exists

It doesn't exist. What package will add it? I tried pure-ftpd, proftpd and vsftp but none of them created that.

Naikon · 25-11-2009 12:50AM

SFTP is your man.
Simple, and requires little fussing about with once setup.

djmarkus · 25-11-2009 02:03AM

Tell us what your distro is, also show the output of

find /usr -name sftp-server

pickarooney · 26-11-2009 10:02PM

djmarkus wrote: »

Tell us what your distro is, also show the output of

find /usr -name sftp-server

Xubuntu Jaunty. find command gives:

/usr/lib/sftp-server
/usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

Subsystem sftp internal-sftp

is in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Should I try changing it to

Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

?

What's the next step after that? Where do the files to be shared go and how do I access my ftp server (using dyndns)?

djmarkus · 27-11-2009 01:58AM

internal-sftp should work,

Lets get back to basics,

Can you ssh to the machine?

pickarooney · 27-11-2009 07:39PM

I can ssh to it from within the network and I've opened the ports for access from outside so theoretically I can... I'll have to test it from outside though.

Herbal Deity · 27-11-2009 07:53PM

What happens when you try to scp a file to it?

pickarooney · 29-11-2009 07:06PM

Herbal Deity wrote: »

What happens when you try to scp a file to it?

I... don't know. What's the syntax for that? I'm not entirely sure what directory is set up as the ftp up/download dir.

Share files over the internet

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