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You might often want to send files to your friends, or anybody or host a file, and people usually resort to online storage service such as Windows Live SkyDrive, or Mediafire and the such. But those services do not give you full control on how the files are served and accessing those sites are usually slow and clunky or require registration.

This post will guide you step by step on how to set up a ftp server on your computer so you can access it anywhere.

Step 1.
Grab yourself Filezilla FTP server and install it. After installing it, you will be presented with a login prompt. This is the login prompt for the server control interface.

Just leave the password blank and press 'OK'. Then you will be presented with the server control interface.

Now you will have to setup the server for use. Of course you have to start adding user first. Click the icon with one user at the top bar.


At the user account control dialog, go to the 'Shared Folder' page.

Then click on 'Add' under 'Users'


Then an 'add user account' dialog appears. Here you can enter your desired username. You can just leave the group as none.



Tip: Use the username 'anonymous' if you want to make the server accessible without a password.

You can add more users later if you want by repeating the steps.

Press OK when you're finished.

Then now you have to assign the folder accessible by that user. You can do that by clicking 'add' under the 'shared folder'.


A 'Browser folder' dialog appears. Here you can specify the folder that is accessible by the user.

For example, you can choose to share 'My Music' folder. Press 'OK' when you are done.
You can choose to share multiple folders for that user by clicking 'add' and choosing another folder.

After adding the folder for that user, you can specify actions allowed to be done on the folder by the user. The tick boxes beside the 'shared folders' allow you to control what the user can do to the folder.

Description of the tickboxes.
Files
Read - allow user to see the folder
Write - allow user to put files into the folder
Delete - allow user to delete files in the folder

Directories
Create - allow user to create folders inside the folder
Delete - allow user to delete folder inside the folder
List - allow user to list folders contained inside the folder
+ Subdirs - apply the rules to the folders inside the folder.

Tip: You can set different rules and permissions for different folders by clicking on the folder and ticking the desired boxes. You can also set shared folders and their properties for different users by selecting the user from the 'Users'

After you're done, it's time to set a password for the user.

You can do that by first, clicking the 'General' page.

Under the 'account settings', tick the 'Password' box and make the password field active. After ticking, type in your desired password and remember. The other settings can be left as it is.

Tip: If you have more than one user, select the user from the 'Users' to view and change settings for the specific user.

When everything is done, just press OK.


You FTP server is now configured and ready to be used. To test out your server, simply go to 'My Computer' and type "ftp://localhost" at the address bar.


And then just press enter and a login prompt appears. Just supply it with the username and password you set earlier.

After logging on you should see the contents of the folder you shared for that user.

Part 2.
Your ftp server is now only accessible on the local network, that is only the computers connected to the local network can see and access the ftp server. In order to make the server accessible outside the local network, just follow the steps below.

Tip: If the computer is directly connected to the internet, you can skip these steps. How can I tell if my computer is directly connected to the internet?

We now will setup port forwarding for your router. Firstly, go to the router configuration page of your router, which are usually http://192.168.1.1, http://192.168.0.1, http://192.168.1.2 or http://10.0.0.1. Just click on one of the addresses and if one of it responds then use that is the router configuration address.

At the router configuration login, just supply it with the username and password. If you don't know them, just use the default credentials by referring it here.
[If you happen to be a Malaysian streamyx user, and happen to be using a TM supplied router, the username is either "tmadmin", or "tmuser", with password "tmadmin" or "tmuser"]



 You should look for something called 'NAT' or 'Port Forwarding' or 'Virual Servers' For my router, it is 'Virutal Servers' located under the 'Advanced Setup'.


At the virtual servers config page, click on 'Add'

Then you should see something like this.


Click on the 'Custom Service' radio button and give the forwarded port a name. The 'Server IP Address' is the address of your computer locally, just put in '192.168.1.254' as this address will be configured as a static address for your computer.

At the Dynamic DNS config page, select your DDNS provider as 'dyndns,org', or 'dlinkddns.com'. They are the same for the two. Enter the URL you created earlier to the hostname field (without www and http:// prefix), and supply it with the credentials you used for the account you created at dlinkddns.com.

To access your ftp server from the outside, just type in 'ftp://[YOUR URL HERE].dlinkddns.com' into a browser's address bar or the address bar of 'My Computer'.