CrushFTP is a full-blown FTP server for people who need to offer others access to their computer by FTP, SFTP, WebDAV . CrushFTP is easy to install, and relatively easy to manage. However, ease-of-use is probably not the most important feature you’re looking for in a FTP server. That’s power, and CrushFTP has more power than Mac OS X Server’s FTP service. I compared the two and found CrushFTP to be a winner by a large margin.

First of all: it’s not the main intention of Ben Spink, the developer of CrushFTP, to replace Mac OS X Server FTP services. But I found that running CrushFTP on a machine running Mac OS X Server made it extremely easy to compare both in terms of what they have to offer. Whereas Mac OS X Server has of course web access with Apache, and FTP is only a part of an encompassing server package, CrushFTP offers services that typically rely on FTP as the core service. And it does it very well. In fact, it does it so well, some administrators of smaller workgroups, might be inclined to go with CrushFTP, rather than with Mac OS X Server’s own FTP service.

The reason for this is CrushFTP having some features that even Mac OS X Server doesn’t have, such as usage quotas and notifications. Ben let me have a go at CrushFTP by giving me a license for 50 users. That was very kind of him, although heavy overkill, as I never open up my machines to any incoming traffic. But to test CrushFTP properly, I had a couple of people upload files to my “WAN machine”. My “WAN machine” is an old Power MAc G4/450DP, which has a full version of Mac OS X Server “Tiger” installed. I have the Mac OS X Firewall set up so that my LAN machines can do whatever they like, while the outside world only has permission to access my LAN through very specific ports.

To have a hardware barrier between the WAN and the LAN, I installed a second Ethernet card in the G4. That one is connected to the Internet. The G4’s native Ethernet port is connected to the LAN. I installed CrushFTP and it immediately recognised the WAN connection. All servers that I set up, already had the WAN IP-address filled in.

Restricting User Access with CrushFTP

To offer access to my guinea pigs living outside the LAN, I could now do two things: I could either set up a Magic Directory, or give them a user-ID and password. The Magic Directory lets you create a folder in a specific way, and have people use that folder’s name as their access ID and their access point. This is great if you’re really totally in the dark when it comes to FTP, networking, etc. This feature is therefore very useful for small printers or advertising firms who can’t afford to hire an IT-manager or to send one of their employees on (expensive!) training.

I chose for the user-ID and password method, because that is somewhat more flexible in that offers you more control over what happens with the directories and files you give access to. I must say my guinea pig had a bit of trouble getting into my carefully set up Virtual Directory. He got to the front door, but no further than this. I suspected a Firewall problem, and so I opened the gateways all the way, turning off the firewall, but that didn’t help either.

At the end of the day, it turned out my uploading guinea pig used a FTP client that sometimes caused him trouble with other FTP-servers as well. When he switched FTP-clients, everything went well. The only remark that I got was that it was slow, but given an ADSL connection running at 3Mbps, this was pretty normal.

Meanwhile, CrushFTP was updating its bandwidth graphs and logs, all in real-time. I could easily follow what my partner in testing was doing. If I would have liked it, I could have set up CrushFTP so that it would send me an e-mail message when the files were finally in. I could also be warned by sound and other gimmicks.

CrushFTP further allows you to easily restrict access to specific times of the day, or to specific directories. Web access is possible, and branding of the web page that holds the CrushFTP interface --we’re still talking FTP and WebDAV here-- is possible too. Finally, CrushFTP supports security in many forms, including SSL, SFTP, encrypted FTP, etc.

It also integrates with the Mac OS if required, by acting as a preference panel. You can switch this on and off at any time. The server can also be started when you log in. This is done through a startup daemon, which again, you can turn on and off at any time. Managing CrushFTP, its users and its servers, can be done through the GUI, but you can also use the Terminal and command-line Unix if preferred.