Allow Students To Use FTP

[6Foot2]

I have a request coming in my direction which involves allowing students to use FTP files to a web hosting site. I seem to recall the last time I looked into this there were good reasons not to allow this as it opened our network up to major abuses.

 

Can anyone remind me what the issues might be. Also do you think it might be possible [somehow] to 'simulate' using FTP within school.

 

Any ideas welcome.

[p858snake]

I have a request coming in my direction which involves allowing students to use FTP files to a web hosting site. I seem to recall the last time I looked into this there were good reasons not to allow this as it opened our network up to major abuses.

 

Can anyone remind me what the issues might be. Also do you think it might be possible [somehow] to 'simulate' using FTP within school.

 

Any ideas welcome.

A. FTP = Insecure Password [sent in Plain Text (Better solution would be sFTP)]

B. Run a server within the school network that is not accessible from the outside world.

 

Why exactly do the students need access to FTP for?

Edited November 12, 2009 by p858snake

[MatthewL]

You could set your own FTP server up in house using something like FileZilla or IIS.

[TwoZeroAlpha]

I got an old box, put Ubuntu server on it then configured vsftp. Does the trick nicely.

 

It's also a LAMP server so with a bit of sym linking I was able to assign home directories pretty much straight into the apache folder /var/www so each student group could upload and test webpages.

[Ric_]

Of course, if you trust the content on the FTP site that will be used, you can deny FTP access to all but that one IP.

[peterdoherty]

erm... http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/44171-personal-webspace-pupils.html#post406578

[Spitfire]

We use ws_ftp with no problems at all, this is on most of our computers

[lauren06]

Hi...

Even we use ws_ftp.

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Managed Service provider

[deanc]

another vote here for setting up an ubuntu server and configuring vsftp

 

also got it LAMPed up so students can play with some PHP devloplemnt.

 

at a guess they are doing something similar to the OCR level 3 where one of the assessment requirements is to upload the website they create to a web server, there is no specific requirement for it to be publicly accessible or for a domain name to be avaliable for it though.