How To Install & Configure FTP Server in Ubuntu 16.04/16.10

Share files remotely thanks to installing and configuring an FTP server and remotely connecting to Ubuntu.

Today we will learn to install an FTP server in Ubuntu 16.10. For this, we will use VSFTPD.

What is VSFTPD?

VSFTPD is an FTP server system which has a GPL license for UNIX systems which obviously is Linux and thanks to its simplicity, security and speed it will become one of the best FTP servers for Linux environments.

Install VSFTPD

First of all, before installing any application in Ubuntu 16.10, it is essential that we update the current packages and repositories, for this we will use the following command:

sudo apt-get update

Once the system is upgraded, we proceed to the installation of the VSFTPD tool using the following command:

sudo apt-get install vsftpd

How To Configure VSFTPD in Ubuntu

Once the application is installed, we must access the /etc/vstfpd.conf path to perform the respective operation settings.

It is advisable to create a backup, so in case of an error we will have available a backup of it, we can use the following command.

cp /etc/vsftpd.conf /etc/vsftpd.conf.bak

Once we have the backup of the configuration file of VSFTPD we proceed to access it using the desired editor: nano or vi, in this case, we will use nano:

sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf

There it will be necessary to navigate on file using the scroll arrows and modify the following fields or check that they have the mentioned values:

Listen: YES

Listen_ipv6 = YES

anonymous_enable = YES

Local_enable = YES

write_enable = YES

Local_umask = 022

anon_upload_enable = YES

anon_mkdir_write_enable = YES

dirmessage_enable = YES

use_localtime = YES

xferlog_enable = YES

connect_from_port_20 = YES

chown_uploads = YES / chown_username = whoever

xferlog_file=/var/log/vsftpd.log

xferlog_std_format = YES

idle_session_timeout = 600

data_connection_timeout = 120

nopriv_user = ftpsecure

async_abor_enable = YES

ascii_upload_enable = YES / ascii_download_enable = YES

ftpd_banner = Welcome to blah FTP service

deny_email_enable = YES / banned_email_file = / etc / vsftpd.banned_emails

chroot_local_user = YES

Once we define the parameters according to the needs we have, we save the file using the key combination: Ctrl + O

We exit the editor using this combination: Ctrl + X

Restart the VSFTPD server in Ubuntu

Whenever we make any changes to the VSFTPD configuration file, we must restart the service to apply the changes, for which we will use the following command:

sudo service vsftpd restart

If we want to stop the service, we will use the following command.

sudo service vsftpd stop

To start it again we will use the following command.

sudo service vsftpd start

Access Remotely using FTP

Once configured these parameters in VSFTPD we can access from another computer in the local network to upload or download files.

In this case, we will do it from Windows 10, so we open a command prompt console and enter the syntax ftp (IP address). There it will be necessary to enter our access credentials to establish the connection correctly.

From this point, we have access to the FTP server of Ubuntu 16.10 and we can transfer files.