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ProFTPD or Pure-FTPd

Posted February 21st, 2006 by sugree

Sometimes you might need to choose the best FTP daemon to run 7x24 on your host. As of 5 years ago, I might say wu-ftpd is the most famous and you should use it. Unfortunately, as the time goes by, because of its popular, wu-ftpd was targeted to be hacked again and again. And then everyone seems to recommend to use SSH instead since there was no good enough alternative solution at that time.

Nowadays, I have to choose again. I found out that ProFTPD is one of the most popular FTP server for Unix server especially hosting service provider. As far as I know, Plesk includes ProFTPD as a standard FTP server. There are so many advanced features come with standard build of ProFTPD. Everything are customizable just like Apache HTTP server. In particular, ProFTPD supports virtual domain. That’s why Plesk chose it.

Actually, I had bad experiences about ProFTPD bundled with Plesk.

  1. Unable to resume transfer
  2. Unable to obtain files with square bracket, [ ], in name
  3. Slow transfer rate

However, it is still a great FTP server I ever used. These bad behaviors are able to eliminate by sophisticate configuration. Unfortunately, I tried to configure ProFTPD on Ubuntu to let it work just like on Plesk and FreeBSD but I could not. Eventually, I tried to migrate to Pure-FTPd which many ones mentioned that it is very secure, never break, and easy! I managed to install Pure-FTPd on Ubuntu in just 10 minutes; 5 minutes for obtaining the binary package and other 5 minutes to configure virtual user. Bingo! It worked like magic. Everything works fine and fast!

By the way, Pure-FTPd is not perfect for me yet. The default package came with Ubuntu doesn’t support large file operation so I had to rebuild the package again myself to enable large file support. In conclusion, Pure-FTPd has some disadvantages listed below.

  1. Don’t support virtual host
  2. Don’t support large file by default

What do you want from FTP server? I just want to transfer large files on a host without virtual domain. That’s why I chose Pure-FTPd.

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Pure-FTPd __SUPPORT__ virtual host

On March 13th, 2006 Anonymous says:
Read here http://www.howtoforge.com/pureftpd_mysql_virtual_hosting This article just piece of crap! It's about nothing. Blogs are full of such crapy 'unique' content.
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pure-ftpd does support virtual user

On March 13th, 2006 sugree says:
Yes, I know it does support virtual user and I has used this feature for a while without problem. Excellent! However, it doesn't support virtual host for sure. Virtual host, in my terminology, means to multiple hostname per IP address. This feature is only useful for hosting service. For example, I have a server with IP address 192.168.1.10 serving 2 domains, says www.a.com and www.b.com. Both of them want to provide anonymous ftp access to their users. How do you do with pure-ftpd? anonymous at ftp.a.com and anonymous at ftp.b.com could point to the same directory. Am I right? I'm so sorry if my blogs are just all crap. I am trying to improve things. This site is just 2 month.
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