Ask HN: Setting up a small office server? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Setting up a small office server?

2 pointsRabidmonkey13 comments

Hi HN,

I have a quick question I'm hoping someone will be able to help me with. I intern at a Hi Def production company in NYC. We're small but very capable and we want to create our own server that we can use to allow clients to FTP large files to and from - our web server simply doesn't cut it for this purpose.

I have an old G4 Mac at my disposal, and am pretty familiar with Linux. We need the server to appear visible on a Mac network, and be accessible through FTP software from anywhere in the world, by our clients (who we'd obviously give a user name and password to, to allow them to access specific folders).

What's the best way to go about this? Any tutorials you can recommend? I'd really appreciate anyone who can steer me in the right direction.

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I'm not sure what you mean by "visible on a Mac network" and why that is necessary . . . won't an IP address and maybe a domain name do ?

If you were doing this with Linux, you should install a common linux distribution (to make sure it won't have security problems out of the box) and then go through and turn off anything that doesn't need to be on, and check it using nmap to see what ports are still open. If you want to educate yourself and go further then download metasploit and see if you can break into it.

Install vsftpd as the ftp server, and make sure it does not allow anonymous login, and make sure the passwords are long and random. If you have ssh on it, which you probably should because you should encourage your people to use scp instead of ftp (graphical tools exist for the mac), make sure you install denyhosts or something similar to keep out the brute-forcing attacks. Try not to have commonly guessable usernames, such as "tom" or "joe" and disallow root login.

But if you have a Mac, can't you install or turn on the Mac's ssh or ftp server and do the same ? That might be simpler.

You might also google for "The Perfect Ubuntu Server" -- there is a series of howto's on how to set up the "perfect" server in various linux distributions.

First off, thanks for the response.

To answer your question and maybe clarify things a bit more - the owners want to be able to simply drag and drop large media files that have been sent by clients onto their local machines (Mac desktop Pro setups with Final Cut Studio 2), where they can then edit the clips, if possible. Our current hosting provider for our website only allows for FTP of files no larger than 20 mb at a time, and when you work with video, you have gigs upon gigs of files - so most companies would simply mail over hard drives, but obviously this is a major hassle. Thus the need for a new solution.

Of course, if you're suggesting that I might be able to accomplish this with mac software, out of the box, I would consider that...

Just using OS X would be a good option for you.

If you check out Sharing in the preferences menu you will see you can set it up to allow ftp connections and from within your own network, easy as that!

Hope you have a good connection over there! ;)

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