ProFtpd vs. VsFtpd

[TechZilla]

SFTP is great, no question about it, but it does not replace FTP over SSL verbatim.

First, to get an FTP like setup, where the user root / directory, is not the server root / directory. You must chroot, this is not trivial by any means, except when running OpenSSH ≥ 4.9p1. Which at the time of the OP, was far from default. Today it's another story, with distributions providing OpenSSH ≥ 5.0. Ubuntu has always provided fairly recent software releases, but that's one of it's unique selling points, not something common to most distributions.

Secondly SFTP is the obvious choice, for admins who already have system accounts. When dealing with developers, you would not want every user transferring files to have an actual system account. You could work around this, with something via PAM, etc.... Although at that point, SFTP losses it's Transparent user configuration. You would have to get granular, groups for developers, groups for systems admins, possibly even groups for vendors.

As far as what I recommend, which is also what I normally implement, SFTP for Systems Admin's and FTP for others. If you normally have a system account, than SFTP is acceptable, otherwise it's a new FTP Account. This situation might change, hopefully one day it will, especially due to OpenSSH feature improvements.

Regarding which FTP server?
Pure-FTPd, performance and security.

Regarding Encryption?
Require Explicit FTP over SSL.

If you need some feature which Pure-FTPd does not provide, go ProFTPd. Although that would be a last choice option, as Pure-FTPd is really my primary FTP server.

[chrisinspace]

Wow...cool to see this thread is still alive and generating some discussion. Since the time I originally posted my question, I have become much more familiar with SFTP, but I still haven't replaced my ProFTPd installation. It works great for what I intended. The comments about developers maintaining files or using rsync to upload the deltas don't reply to my scenario. I have clients that send me a new unique files every day. ProFTPd has worked really well. It's easy to administer the users and keep them isolated in their home directories. I was able to apply my Digicert SSL certificate. It has nice logs showing when users connect and when they transfer files. All in all, I've been very happy and would recommend it in that specific circumstance. I've also set up SFTP on a personal server for the use of me and a few of my friends. It's been fantastic, too. It was very simple to get going and it's been very reliable. My friends have no problem connecting to it using Filezilla.

Thanks to scorp123 and the other posters on this thread, I was able to find the right solution to my original issue and learn a lot about other solutions. I hope others find this thread as useful as it was for me.

[aerokid240]

Ain't nothing wrong with using FTPS (once you get it working nicely with your firewall). Try both SFTP and ftps (vsftpd or pro-ftpd) and which ever one looks like the least amount of hassle to maintain for you then that might be the winner. I wont say there is a substantial enough reason to shy you away from using FTPs. I would say, for alot of users (that require their own login, but not shell access), i would prefer to use vsftpd or proftpd with virtual users as it has been far easier to setup for me.