SFTP - username/password instead of cert (vsFTPd)

Question

Is it possible to configure vsFTPd or other server to use (1) SFTP over port 22 (2) be encrypted but only require username and password. What is the "https" equivalent in the SFTP world. I don't want to copy a cert to every machine that needs to call into my server.

Is there a combination of settings that can achieve this? I thought I had done this before when I needed to copy files to a location and needed all the traffic to be over a single port for a picky firewall. I'm currently working on a vsFTPd server and can't seem to get this last piece of configuration correct.

Answer 1

You could do this by simply install a ssh server and create a unix account:

$ sudo apt-get install ssh

$ sudo adduser toto
Enter password: 1234
Verify password: 1234

You have to verify that ssh configuration authorize password based access:

$ sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config 
 # ... verify/change the lines:

PermitEmptyPasswords no

# and
PasswordAuthentication yes

Than you could reach your host with couple: username: toto and password: 1234.

Answer 2

You are confusing SFTP with FTPS. SFTP is Secure FTP; FTP Encrypted over an SSH session. FTPS is SSL-secured FTP. In other words, FTPS is to FTP what HTTPS is to HTTP.

You cannot use vsFTPd to serve SFTP traffic, but you can use it to serve FTPS traffic.

It sounds like you want to keep things simple, so SFTP is most likely the way you want to go. You'll need WinSCP (Windows), Transmit (Mac), or some other SFTP-capable client to connect to it, or use any of a plethora of command line tools. As F Hauri has pointed out, an SFTP server is easily installed by installing SSH on most modern distros, using whatever package management tool they utilize, and permissions are managed at the machine level, usually with an ssh group.