HOWTO Ridiculously easy home file sharing with FTP and Zeroconf

[handy]

Yes, jetdirect for the HP.

I only started looking today for a solution to connect my wifes 2 machines. I found this link which started me down the Zeroconf path, & led me to your thread here.

We are running 10.3X Panther, not Tiger, (don't want to buy an upgrade, Panther does all required) Does that make difference do you think?

I haven't even begun to actually set up the ftp stuff. This is me still working out what I am going to do...

[dipasqum]

Apologies in advance if this is a dumb question...

I followed the steps to the letter. I have two Ubuntu machines. The only time I can see the FTP sharing icons is if I launch a nautilus window under sudo.

Meaning, off the menu bar they don't appear but avahi zerconf browser sees the services. When I launch places/ network servers I just see Windows network.

When I 'gksudo nautilus', Go/Network, I see Windows network FTP FIle Sharing FTP FIle Sharing #2.

Permissions seems to be the logical place to look but is it my ID or the configuration of avahi? Guidance would be much appreciated!

TIA

[dyssident]

When I 'gksudo nautilus', Go/Network, I see Windows network FTP FIle Sharing FTP FIle Sharing #2.

wow,, that is strange.. ill check the bug database because,, as i understand it,, zeroconf announced services should always be shown.. frankly,, ive been consistently underwhelmed by most OS's support for zeroconf browsing,, so i cant say this entirely surprises me..

that said,, zeroconf host naming should still work for you,, so you can always do Places > Connect to Server, set Service Type to FTP with Login,, and enter the name of the box you are connecting to in "Server" in the form HOSTNAME.local..

perhaps,, like Icarus,, we are trying to fly too close to the glorious sunlight of effortless file sharing..

[blip]

Well this actually worked for me! After having nothing but frustration with Samba, this actually worked on my first try.

Anyway, I was just wondering a few things:

1) Just to confirm, the FTP server in this setup can only be accessed from inside the local network, right?

2) On one computer I want to share a whole partition. The only way I could get this to work was by mounting the partition to the home directory I login to. It works, but is there a more elegant approach?

3) Does anyone have a simple way of doing scheduled backups to the local vsftpd server?

Sorry for the newbish questions and thanks for the great write up!

[behemot]

Thanks,
It is a great how-to.

Do you know how to get rid of "Windows Network" under Places-> Network Servers?
I have no Windows machines running on my network and I am not planning on sharing files in Windows environment.

[dyssident]

1) Just to confirm, the FTP server in this setup can only be accessed from inside the local network, right?

right, unless you create a virtual server through your home networks firewall. but i would not want to expose an ftp service to the outside world. im going to do this same tutorial with SSH in the future, and that would be a much better choice.

2) On one computer I want to share a whole partition. The only way I could get this to work was by mounting the partition to the home directory I login to. It works, but is there a more elegant approach?

im on a windows box, so im doing this from memory. forgive me if it doesnt work the first time.

1. edit configuration file with `sudo gedit /etc/vsftpd.conf`
2. comment out "chroot_local_user=YES"
3. set 'local_root' to the directory users should start out in. in your case, it will be the mount point of a given drive like /dev/hda
4. close vsftpd.conf
5. restart with `sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart`

whenever you log in, you will start out in /dev/hda, or whatever directory you set local_root to.

3) Does anyone have a simple way of doing scheduled backups to the local vsftpd server?

as soon as i add the bit to the tutorial (which i will do very soon) that describes how to mount a remote ftp server as a local drive, it will be as easy as writing a script and running it as a cron job. with what you have now, all file shuffling is done through Gnome, so its not really easy to script. i think your only real option is to drag and drop.

[dyssident]

Do you know how to get rid of "Windows Network" under Places-> Network Servers?

yea, that is quite an eyesore. im not aware of a way, but you may want to ask on the Gnome Nautilus mailing list.

[bparker2003]

Ive followed this really easy walk thru, thanks for that by the way, but when i try to connect inbetween my two ubuntu machines, the folders that open are empty and i cant write to them, does anyone know where i went wrong?

[blip]

Thanks for the answers dyssident! Look forward to seeing the mounting instructions. Honestly setting this up was so much easier than working with samba I could hardly believe it!

bparker2003 - I'm new to this too so my advice isn't the most useful but the thing that comes to my mind first is a funny firewall setting on either or both machines. I seem to recall running into similar problems with a misconfigured firewall in windows a few years back but I could be wrong.

[bparker2003]

ill check my firestarter settings, thanks i didnt think of that