simple SFTP-like server for Windows?

[David Schwartz 426]

Anybody know of any simple SFTP-like servers I can run on a windows server to avoid having to deal with the built-in Windows crap?

 

I just want a simple way to push files from my dev machine to a host running a service.

 

Setting them up in Explorer gives Windows fits ... I don't know how many times it has to download every file just to display the directory! But it seems to go out to lunch for several minutes and freeze up the entire frigging desktop and the RDP itself.

 

Something like Dropbox would be perfect. I just don't want to install Dropbox there b/c I only want it to mirror one single small folder, not my entire Dropbox.

 

I have a list of files and I want to click a button and they'll be sent up to a folder on this other machine completely in the background, nothing on either end will freeze-up or even know something is going on. They'll just pop out the other end a minute or so later.

 

Any ideas what might work?

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

https://filezilla-project.org/ aka "The free FTP solution" has both a client and a server.

Open source, and pretty good.

Configurable connections, including source and target folders.
Quick, easy and reliable - and you can set a throttle for the transfer rates if you need to.

 

Edit: One significant drawback - the client is not suitable for command line scripting.  If you need to do that, you need to use WinSCP or PowerShell.

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

+ for Filezilla - and honestly there's no other simple free solutions that I'm aware of (besides your own app built on Indy or ICS class). However, I only prefer 0.9.x versions as they changed much in 1.x and I couldn't get it working - some dumb cert issue

[dummzeuch 1505]

There is SyncThing, an open source alternative to e.g. Dropbox, that works peer to peer. It can be run as a service on Windows or simply as a regular program. There are implementations for multiple OSes. Setting it up isn't as difficult as it looks at first, but it takes a bit of reading the docs.

[Der schöne Günther 316]

For many, many years, I have used HFS. Not FTP, but HTTP. Just a portable .exe that hosts a http server that allows clients to download files and folders, and also upload.

 

Quote

Initially developed in 2002 with Delphi 6, now with Delphi 10.3.3 (Community Edition)

 

https://github.com/rejetto/hfs2

https://www.rejetto.com/hfs

 

 

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

Does HFS support secure connections?

[Der schöne Günther 316]

Only the Typescript version, not the Delphi one, unfortunately.

Edited February 1, 2022 by Der schöne Günther

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

2 hours ago, Der schöne Günther said:

Only the Typescript version, not the Delphi one, unfortunately.

Weird. It is based on ICS which supports TLS

[Virgo 18]

What version of Windows? Windows 10 OpenSSH server has sftp server.

[Stéphane Wierzbicki 45]

Syncplify provides free and paid SFTP servers. 

[David Schwartz 426]

On 2/1/2022 at 1:41 AM, Der schöne Günther said:

For many, many years, I have used HFS. Not FTP, but HTTP. Just a portable .exe that hosts a http server that allows clients to download files and folders, and also upload.

 

 

https://github.com/rejetto/hfs2

https://www.rejetto.com/hfs

 

 

This looks very interesting. 

[David Schwartz 426]

On 2/1/2022 at 12:45 AM, dummzeuch said:

There is SyncThing, an open source alternative to e.g. Dropbox, that works peer to peer. It can be run as a service on Windows or simply as a regular program. There are implementations for multiple OSes. Setting it up isn't as difficult as it looks at first, but it takes a bit of reading the docs.

This is perfect for what I'm looking for. It's secure and there are lots of help videos on YouTube.

 

HFS looks interesting, but the lack of secure connections bothers me. Also, I tried to build it and there are all sorts of components that need to be installed but I didn't see them documented anywhere. Not fun.

 

I'm going with SyncThing. 

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

23 hours ago, David Schwartz said:

the lack of secure connections bothers me

It should be available since ICS can use OpenSSL. But probably requires some changes. As an alternative, one could use reverse proxy like Nginx (it's very common to leave all TLS stuff to this tool together with load balancing, anti-DDOS and other things not burdening the business server with all this)

[Angus Robertson 574]

If by SFTP you mean secure FTP rather than Simple FTP (a UDP protocol), ICS has a sample OverbyteIcsSslMultiFtpServ.dpr which is really designed to be a Windows service application. It supports multiple SSL hosts with multiple listeners, can order it's own SSL certificates and will create self signed certificates for any missing, and will email status information and errors to an administrator.  This sample is really a commercial FTP server and just needs the addition of user accounts. 

 

Angus

 

[Edwin Yip 154]

My experience has shown that FreeSSHd is better than FileZilla.

[Virgo 18]

3 hours ago, Angus Robertson said:

If by SFTP you mean secure FTP rather than Simple FTP (a UDP protocol), ICS has a sample OverbyteIcsSslMultiFtpServ.dpr which is really designed to be a Windows service application. It supports multiple SSL hosts

sftp means usually ssh builtin file transsefer server. Ftp over TLS/SSL is ftps.  I actually had not heard about simple ftp.

[Attila Kovacs 629]

On 2/1/2022 at 8:45 AM, dummzeuch said:

There is SyncThing

This SyncThing is really nice, there are also QNAP packages. let's see how fast is it compared to rsync.

Combined with https://www.zerotier.com/ could be a powerful combo running in the background on the NAS'es.

[dummzeuch 1505]

1 hour ago, Attila Kovacs said:

This SyncThing is really nice, there are also QNAP packages. let's see how fast is it compared to rsync.

Combined with https://www.zerotier.com/ could be a powerful combo running in the background on the NAS'es.

I have been using it for several years to sync my photos and notes (from the DenkZettel app) on my smartphone to my desktop PC (via an old notebook running 24/7 which also runs pihole). Works very well. As to how fast it is, I have no idea. It simply runs in the background (as a service) and does its job.

[Angus Robertson 574]

3 hours ago, Virgo said:

sftp means usually ssh builtin file transsefer server. Ftp over TLS/SSL is ftps.  I actually had not heard about simple ftp.

SFTP and FTPS can mean anything people want to mean, using those letters without explanation is confusing. 

 

Angus

 

[microtronx 38]

We've used https://www.nsoftware.com/sftp/sftpserver/ when we needed a lightweight server, installed in seconds with good functionality.

[Attila Kovacs 629]

On 2/9/2022 at 3:11 PM, dummzeuch said:

As to how fast it is, I have no idea.

It's fast and it's better as rsync for my task. Thx!