This tutorial is for Fedora Linux. If you are looking for setting up Pure-FTPd on FreeBSD, click here.

My client likes to send me a huge data file (More than 10GB after compressed). Since I don’t care about the security during the transfer, I decide to go with the old school technology: FTP.

Basically, I need to set up a FTP server with virtual user. In the other words, the log in used by the FTP server has nothing to do with my system login, and I can easily disable that at any time.

0.) Make sure port 21 is opened. You can update this setting in the Fedora Firewall settings.

1.) Install Pure-FTPd

sudo yum install pure-ftpd -y

2.) Create a user for Pure-FTPd, here I simply call it ftpuser.

sudo adduser ftpuser

3.) Let say, we want to create a user called guest to access the ftp server. guest is a virtual user, and its virtual home is in /home/ftpuser/guest

sudo mkdir /home/ftpuser/guest
sudo chown -R ftpuser:ftpuser  /home/ftpuser/
sudo chmod a+rw -R /home/ftpuser/

4.) Edit the Pure-FTPd configuration

sudo nano /etc/pure-ftpd/pure-ftpd.conf

5.) Uncomment the following:

PureDB                        /etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb

6.) Start the Pure-FTPd

/etc/init.d/pure-ftpd start

If you want to start Pure-FTPd automatically, include this line in /etc/rc.local

7.) Create a user and add it into the Pure-FTPd database:

sudo pure-pw useradd guest -u ftpuser -d /home/ftpuser/guest/

You can also set the quota and maximum space:
1000 files, 100MB quota

pure-pw useradd guest -u ftpuser -d /home/ftpuser/guest/ -n 1000 -N 100 

8.) Set the password in case you forget the enter the password:

pure-pw passwd guest

9.) Update the database:

pure-pw mkdb

That’s it!

–Derrick