How to turn on SFTP in Fedora 17

Question

I want to turn on SFTP server in Fedora 17. What are the steps?

Answer 1

If you need the sftp service that comes with SSH, it should be enabled by default with SSH itself. You'll want to enable port 22 connections from the outside however.

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

You can also do the following if you want to start/restart the service for the current boot session:

service sshd restart

Answer 2

I was able to figure out how to do it

I decided to use vsftpd which is very secure ftp daemon and it worked. I'm still a little unsure what is going on, hopefully someone can make this a canonical answer.

First make sure that you have vsftp installed, as root run this:

/sbin/service vsftpd status

If it isn't installed, install it:

yum install vsftpd

Edit the config file: /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf

Set anonymous_enable=NO if you don't want other people logging in anonymously.

Start it if it is not started already:

/sbin/service vsftpd start

From the other machine use this command on commandline:

sftp yourusername@yourIPaddress

Then you are prompted for a username/password.

You may have to check over your SSH settings as defined in this site:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=283775

If you are logging in to the FTP server through a router, you may have to add a port forward.