[Chester LUG] FTP Appliances

[George]

Stuart Burns wrote:
> It's a long shot but does anyone know of either a) A decent, inexpensive 
> file transfer appliance (less than the $4000 of the accellion devices) 
> or b) Where I can download an application that does the same thing.

It depends really how incredibly easy incredibly easy is... Both WebDAV 
and SFTP (via WinSCP) are quite easy to use but they still might not be 
easy enough.

I haven't any experience of web based ones but even if you had to write 
one yourself it should be possible to put one together within a day at 
most. You shouldn't have to bother with authentication, a one time 
random URL for each uploaded set of files e-mailed to the intended 
recipient should be fine.

If you retain the leave large file attachments enabled on the mail 
server then there's going to be no incentive for people to remember to 
do this other thing though. You could perhaps use a filter on your mail 
server to strip out all the attachments, save them to another server and 
put a hyperlink to their new location in-line in the message. Of course 
whatever method you use for this you still have the problem that the 
files are stored somewhere on your network using up space.

Another, more BOFH'ish solution is you apply a size limit but make it 
random somehow. If people ask about it say that e-mail is unreliable for 
large attachments and suggest they resend. Soon they'll learn the error 
of their ways. Mwhahahahaahahaahahahaahaha. Ahem.

George