File transfers and Windows

I've had need on a couple of occasions of a way to transfer files around. Having never really come up with a good online file hosting solution, I decided to have a punt at setting something up on my PC which could do the basics.

FTP wasn't a preferred solution, since it's not the most secure of protocols. FTPS (i.e. FTP with SSL) is a good step up in security, but doesn't seem particularly well supported by client programs or server apps (do I correctly remember something about needing certificates to do it properly? This all happened a while ago).

Anyway, I settled on trying to set up an SFTP server. SFTP is a protocol that's closely related to SSH, and reasonably well-supported.

To find out more about file transfer protocols, why not start at the FTP page on Wikipedia?

(Incidentally, there are of course plenty of other ways to solve this problem, but this solution's pretty straightforward.)


Tools

Thankfully, a very lightweight server app for Windows turned up before too long spent with Google - Core FTP's Free SFTP server, which can be downloaded from here.

If you're after more features - including support for FTP / FTPS etc, then Cerberus FTP did a good job when I tried it out. I didn't stick with it because it just seemed a bit excessive for my simple requirements.

Having tried a couple of different ways to manipulate files onto and out of my computer from remote locations, I recommend either:
1. FireFTP - an extension for Firefox which can understand all this (it has PuTTY integrated into it)
2. WinSCP - a standard executable for Windows, which optionally comes as a standalone download.


A note to ST585 users

It turns out that the Thomson ST585 (a wireless router) auto rewrites the PASV replies that an FTP server generates, so any server software should be told not to do it - all you've got to do is open and forward port 21, and it should work.