Compilation

After the download of OpenFTPD you first have to extract the archive file with tar -xzf openftpd.1.x.tar.gz

OpenFTPD compiles under several UNIX platforms. But it is currently tested only on Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The source code is compiled by calling ./configure and make.

The configure scripts sets up the Makefiles for your system, the makecommand starts the compilation.

The configure script detects the best C compiler automatically. If it uses the wrong C compiler, you can tell it explicitly which C compiler to use. To do so, set the environment variable CC before calling configure (e.g. export CC=/some/odd/path/to/cc).

If you want to have to possibility to save and load user and group information DES encrypted, then answer y when the configure script asks you for DES. If it does not compile on your machine, you can get the DES package yourself, build the DES library using the instructions that are in the package, and copy the library (libdes.a) to the lib subdirectory of OpenFTPD. Hopefully it works then.

The included DES package (in fact, it is only a part of the package - the main library) is des-2.1.tar.gz by Antti Louko (see lib/README and lib/COPYRIGHT for details).

Warning: You should not use the encryption if you don't really need it, if something goes wrong you may not be able to recover your userfile.

Now it will ask you for the maximum filelength, the default lenght is 128, you should only change this if you know you never have files that large and want to save a few bytes in the permission files or if you know you'll have filenames even longer. But beware, you can't change this size later without recompiling and the old permissions will become useless.

Another option is to disable the SITE EXEC command which is quite dangerous because it allows you to execute shell commands via FTP.

Don't enable the traceroute ip bans if you don't know what you are doing, but if you need to deny all transfers to special parts of the internet (if you have to pay for usa transfers for example) then you should answer with yes.

Installation and Startup

After a successful compilation of OpenFTPD, you get the three binary files ftpd, ftps and ftpa placed in the standard/sbin directory. The first one is the "real" daemon, it is utilised to start the FTP server. It reads the configuration file and accepts connections from clients. When a connection is requested, ftpd spawns ftps (normal ftp clients) or ftpa (admin clients).

Move the whole standard directory to a place of your choice (you may rename it also) and configure OpenFTPD manually if you are an experienced user or simply use the automatic install script (recommended!).

Type make install to start the interactive install script that will ask you for some settings and will copy all necessary files to a location of your choice.

If you haven't used the install script, edit the file etc/ftpd.reg and choose the port numbers and the base directory. You may also specify other options (all valid options for the registry are listed on the config section on this site. Now you are ready to start the server by executing ftpd from the sbin subdir.

You should see a startup screen with important informations about your configuration now. If there is an error message instead you should check the log files.