Advice setting up filezilla server with Huawei HG659b Modem and google mesh.

Forums › LAN (ethernet/Wifi/routers/Bluetooth) › Advice setting up filezilla server with Huawei HG659b Modem and google mesh.

absorb

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#257220 20-Sep-2019 17:25

I tried to set up a filezilla server the other day to share some large files with friends and ran into trouble due to issues requiring bridging etc.

I'm not very technical but I can usually follow instructions.

As mentioned in the title I have a Huawei HG659b Modem and a google mesh with 3 satellites set up around the place.

One is in the garage which is about 20m from the house and contains my mining computers which are wired into a switch that's connected to the mesh unit.

I am open to changing my hardware if that would help but I am not completely confident to attempt the bridging in case I can't get the net back up for some reason :)

Cheers

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Geek @ Coastguard NZ
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#2321471 20-Sep-2019 18:03

Are you trying to use the FTP server across LAN to other PC's, or over internet ?

If LAN, then in theory, setup username/password and dirs, and that should be it.

For internet, you just need to open port 21 on your Huawei - however, Ive had nothing but nightmares setting up ports on HG659's (A and B).

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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TheoM

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#2321472 20-Sep-2019 18:04

Is this FTP going to be externally accessed?

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Gordy7

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#2321495 20-Sep-2019 18:26

Have you considered synching your drive storage folder to cloud storage and sharing a cloud storage folder with your recipient. No need for Filezilla. No mods to standard HG659 config would be required. You could use Onedrive, Google Drive or Mega.

Gordy

My first ever AM radio network connection was with a 1MHz AM crystal(OA91) radio receiver.

absorb

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#2321496 20-Sep-2019 18:27

Yes, across the internet.

I had it working locally no problem but it was the issue passing through 2 routers that was causing me grief

I wanted to get the FTP working. It should have been easy :P

I can share through a server I rent space on but the files are too big for the other suggested methods. 20GB plus

I also managed to share files using anydesk, which is a great program but I'm not sure about resume on failure.

I really just wanted to know for the sake of knowing.

I also have a PC with freenas running full time.

Forwarding the ports to the host PC's IP seems to be the problem. I don't really know...

TheoM

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#2321501 20-Sep-2019 18:40

FTP consumes 2 ports for transfer, and up to 10k for the clients. you'll need to open 20, 21, and whatever ephemeral range FZ has. also note FTP is incredibly insecure

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absorb

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#2321504 20-Sep-2019 18:44

TheoM:

FTP consumes 2 ports for transfer, and up to 10k for the clients. you'll need to open 20, 21, and whatever ephemeral range FZ has. also note FTP is incredibly insecure

When you say insecure, do you mean to the host?

Maybe I should forget about it :)

Cheers TheoM :)

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#2321517 20-Sep-2019 19:07

Use sftp, only need to forward port 22.

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#2321521 20-Sep-2019 19:33

Wow.... files 20GB plus.... lots of internet traffic too... :-)

Gordy

My first ever AM radio network connection was with a 1MHz AM crystal(OA91) radio receiver.

michaelmurfy

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#2321583 20-Sep-2019 20:33

I would never set up FTP these days - it is incredibly insecure.

Instead, look at setting up Nextcloud on your Freenas server:

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allio

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#2321602 20-Sep-2019 21:13

Is your ISP using CG-NAT?

timmmay

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#2321606 20-Sep-2019 21:22

User Resilio Sync, it's easy and generally works fine on most internet connections.

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#2321607 20-Sep-2019 21:22

Why not just OneDrive or similar? Once you've uploaded them they're done. I have plenty of files and folders in my 1TB OneDrive that are tens of GBs.

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#2321622 20-Sep-2019 21:42

TheoM:

FTP consumes 2 ports for transfer, and up to 10k for the clients. you'll need to open 20, 21, and whatever ephemeral range FZ has. also note FTP is incredibly insecure

I only port 21, works fine. Nothing of value on the system its on so if someone breaks in, good on them.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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TheoM

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#2321632 20-Sep-2019 21:55

xpd:

TheoM:

FTP consumes 2 ports for transfer, and up to 10k for the clients. you'll need to open 20, 21, and whatever ephemeral range FZ has. also note FTP is incredibly insecure

I only port 21, works fine. Nothing of value on the system its on so if someone breaks in, good on them.

For Active FTP I suppose that's fine. Passive uses a lot more ports

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fe31nz

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#2321750 21-Sep-2019 00:06

If the client that is doing the downloads is using passive FTP, then you need a really smart router to do it - the router will need to read the FTP connection traffic on port 21 and open the passive FTP data port based on what is in that traffic. I think Ciscos can do it, but I have never seen that feature in less capable routers. So first off, if you really want to do this, you need to set up the FTP server to only do active FTP, where it uses port 20 only for the FTP data traffic. And you need to use an FTP client that can be told to do active FTP only - browsers normally do passive FTP and do not automatically try active FTP when passive fails to connect. I have my ancient FTP server on my OS/2 virtual machine set up so it simply rejects connection attempts where passive FTP is requested.

Next, you MUST disable anonymous login to your FTP server. If you allow anonymous logins, you will shortly find that your FTP server has been uploaded lots of porn or illegal files by someone who found it and is using it to distribute the files. Your PC will overflow its disk in short order, and the police may well turn up to arrest you. If you do not actually need the capability for uploading, make sure to disable that too.

Third, make sure that you set up good passwords for your clients to use - FTP servers do attract a fair number of bots trying to break into them, and your only protection is a good username/password combination.

Ideally, if you know where your clients are connecting from, you should get the FTP server or the router to only allow access from their specific IP addresses (if they have static IP addresses), or the range of IP addresses that come from their ISP only. That way all the bots from Russia, China or running on Amazon services will be excluded completely.

Make sure you have logging set up - you do need to keep an eye on the traffic until you are sure that you are secure, and you may well need to add rules to exclude particularly persistent bots from even connecting - the bad bots make hundreds of connections per minute trying to guess your usernames and passwords. If the FTP software can do it, use the option that prevents multiple connections from the same IP address at once, and rate limit connections from the same IP address to say one per minute. A good router may be able to do rate limiting also.

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