Server Setup Basic Settings CrushFTP has two locations for its preferences. The basic settings are located under the "Prefs" tab on the main screen while the advanced settings are under the file menu. • You can turn on and off logging to a file. If you really don’t care what goes on in the server, you don’t have to keep permanent log files. • Beep when users connect is useful if you want some form of audio feedback of when users are connecting to the server. This option is not available when running it as a service since that would break the rules of being a service. • The speech enabled is another form of audio feedback that can be used to read most anything. Its default setting is where it reads the username of each user as they connect. • Hide splash screen will hide the initial loading splash screen if you want the server to run in a more invisible mode. • Max users is the maximum number of users that can be connected to the server at one time. • The port is the port that the main server is listening on. If you do not use port 21, do not expect your router/firewall, or other end users routers/firewalls to work properly with your server. If you have several virtual servers you will need to use the advanced prefs for editing the port. • "FTP aware NAT router / firewall." is on by default and makes CrushFTP run in a compliant mode where the router / firewall does all the work for you. You don't need to map any ports other than ftp(21) to your machine, or do any other settings to CrushFTP. If you turn this checkbox off, then you will need to manually map a range of ports on your router, and set the PASV ports here. [This is also required if your FTP server is not running on the default port 21. NAT will automatically edit your TCP/IP streams when you run on port 21. If you run on another port, then it will not help you and edit them. That's OK since CrushFTP knows your real IP anyway, and you can tell it what ports you are going to use. Users who connect to you that are behind their own NAT router, or firewall will have to use passive (PASV) mode to connect since their NAT system will not understand another port other than 21 for FTP.] • The banned IP list is a listing of IP’s that are currently banned. You may have other IP restrictions set, but the banned IP list is the list of ranges where the start, and stop range are the same. You are allowed to add more here, edit existing ones, or remove one entirely. • Windows users have the option to turn off the auto minimize to system tray if they don't want that function. Advanced Settings The advanced settings are the rest of the preferences for the server. All the basic settings should be available here (although they may look different), plus a whole lot more. The default settings should be all most users need…but you're allowed to change anything you need to. Its always a good policy to not change something when your unsure of its purpose. General_Settings This tab is sort of a collection of settings that didn’t fit with any of the other tabs. The settings here are the general type settings most other FTP servers would have. • Beep when users connect is a way to have audio feedback when a user connects to your server. • Deny reserved ports will not allow any PORT command from a user to specify a port that is below 1025. • The log file enabled logging of all server activity to the crush_ftp.log file. • The roll log settings are to specify how often you want the log rolled over and a new one started. Logs are stored in the logs folder once they have been rolled. You can also specify a delete option to delete the log when its rolled. • Hide splash screen hides the initial splash screen. Useful if your running CrushFTP in a more discrete mode. • Redundant bandwidth switching is a feature that will force the next item in a remote servers more items list when this server is using more than 90% of its max speed and a user attempts to upload, or download a file. This is only useful when you have setup a mirroring FTP system, and have several locations to host files from. CrushFTP can then switch to the next in list when this server is peaked. You also can setup a directory to be redundant, or load balanced. This is just a step beyond that where those would either always switch, or never switch unless a server was down. • Always doing transfers in BINARY just starts the FTP session in BINARY mode, or TYPE I mode. Some FTP clients forget to issue this command and by doing so, files would be transferred in ASCII mode. • Speech enabled indicates whether CrushFTP should read verbally the text between <SPEAK></SPEAK> in server responses. Speech is only available to MacOS 8/9 users. • There are three fields for MacOS X/ Linux/ Unix users. You can specify the default owner, group, and default privs for files/folders to have when they are created. If a CrushFTP username matches an OS username that will be handled automatically. By default files/folders created are owned by root. • Packet size is always being changed on the fly on a per user / per transfer basis. Every upload and download is recalculating the fastest packet size. • Max users is the maximum users allowed to connected at a time. This however may be overridden by your license amount. The non registered shareware max is 5 users. • Max server outgoing speed is the total download bandwidth users have to take from you. Setting it to 0 means no limit. • Max server incoming speed is the total upload bandwidth users have to give to you. Setting it to 0 means no limit. • Add how many years to MDTM is a fix for a bug where JAVA does not see the years properly on some files. You can use this to specify positive or negative years. • Save report stats to disk is the timer that is running that saves the reports to disk. You don’t want this too often as this can take a while when you get a larger history built up. It also saves the server preferences to disk at this time too. Server preferences are saved in many other cases as well…like when you quit, or click the OK button. Report stats are also saved when you quit CrushFTP. • Tracking of downloaded files is the max number of files to keep in its history of downloads. Downloaded files aren’t tracked every time. If the file has already been tracked, a download count number is just incremented. • Tracking of uploaded files contains more information than downloaded files. However, uploaded files are only tracked once per file since a file should only exist once. • Tracking for logins is the number of IP’s per user to track. IP_Settings These settings relate to IP’s in some way. They have all been organized under this tab. • Deny FXP will prevent a user from specifying a PORT command that has an IP other than their own IP address. FXP is a method of transferring files from one server to another without the data ever going through the client. • Allow automatic JAVA reserve lookups is useful to people who have a slow DNS server, or problematic server. JAVA always tries to reverse lookup an IP address to get its host-name. This will prevent this situation from happening, but as a result all IPs logged will all be 0.0.0.0. • Hard coded IP allows you to specify the IP address of the server. This is useful if you don’t want to use the auto IP discovery feature that will lookup your current IP from a web page it hits. • Translate PORT commands will change PORT commands that specify "10.0.x.x", and "192.168.x.x" to be the real IP of the user that is connected. Since few FTP clients let you specify your IP, this will fix issues with FTP clients behind a router that does not do NAT. It will of course only be effective if that user happens to have all IP’s on their router being mapped through to their machine though. Its a rare case where this is helpful. This will be removed in a future version since its no longer useful. • The PASV port range is not used if your router supports NAT, your running on port 21, and you have selected the "FTP aware router/firewall" checkbox under the prefs tab of the main screen of CrushFTP. If you are needing to manually map the ports CrushFTP will use, then these are the range of ports that CrushFTP will use for PASV transfers. The format is start_port,end_port. A comma or dash is important! I usually recommend users to use "2000,2010" and to map ports 2000-2010 to the machine running CrushFTP. If you are manually mapping ports, make sure you do true mappings and not a port triggering method some routers support. • IP Restrictions and bans is a way to "hide" your FTP server, or just deny logins from some IPs. You could setup your server to only allow connections from certain IPs, and all other attempts from other IPs would seem as if the server didn’t even exist.