FTP Setup

Question

FTP Setup

Hi All,

I'm hoping someone can help me out with something I'm trying to set up. I have two computers, one running Yosemite and the other running Snow Leopard. My Snow Leopard computer stays at home and is connected to some external hard drives that house a lot of my files. I'd like to be able to access this computer remotely using my Yosemite machine.

I have VNC Server & Viewer and was able to successfully configure those through port forwarding on my router. My issue with this method is that in times when I have a poor connection, this uses up too much bandwidth, since it's a visual interface. Ideally, I'd like to use Cyberduck or another FTP client to log in to my Snow Leopard machine and just have a list of files and folders in front of me.

So, I turned on FTP access in the Sharing panel of System Preferences, but of course, the only address it lists is the local subnet address of 192.168.0.10. Now, I thought maybe I could just use the port I opened to make VNC Viewer work and access it that way. For example, if my IP address is 68.146.XXX.XXX and the port I've opened is 1234, then I would connect via FTP using those credentials.

This does not work, unfortunately. So I'm looking to you all to see if any of you have some pointers about where I'm going wrong and what I might do to make this work.

Thanks!

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Mar 24, 2016 5:00 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

BobHarris

Level 9

53,117 points

Mar 24, 2016 8:04 PM in response to Jillian Logee

DO NOT USE ftp this way. It is way too insecure.

Rather use SFTP via System Preferences -> Sharing -> Remote Login. SFTP is SSH based and very secure. CyberDuck should handle SFTP connections.

Setup port 22 port forwarding. MAKE SURE you have a secure user account password. Easy to remember and type, but make it long as all things being equal a longer password is much more secure than a complex short password.

If Cyberduck allows you to specify an SFTP destination port, you could cut down on script kiddies probing the well known ssh port 22 trying to login to root (they do this, even though root is not enabled on OS X systems). This probing is just an annoyance. Anyway if Cyberduck will allow specifying a destination port you can have your router forward a high numbered port to your Mac's port 22. For example you tell you router to listen on port 34567 and direct connection on that port to your Mac's port 22. Choose a high numbered port of your liking (under 65,565)

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Answer 2

Camelot

Level 9

54,333 points

Mar 25, 2016 12:18 AM in response to Jillian Logee

Bob is right - don't use FTP like this. It's horribly insecure.

However, I did want to add that the reason why your setup didn't work is because of the FTP protocol and how hard it is to get through firewalls. FTP uses multiple ports (one for commands and another for data), and you have to configure your router to forward both - setting the FTP port to an obscure number to obfuscate your server is a mild first step, but it doesn't help if you don't setup the transfer ports as well.

Overall, though, best to avoid FTP and use SFTP instead.

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Answer 3

Mar 25, 2016 9:53 AM in response to BobHarris

Thank you so much, Bob! This works perfectly and I'm very happy to be using the more secure SSH method! I was concerned about leaving ports open like that, but I'm glad to have the extra authentication needed.

Thanks again!

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