>>File transfer protocol is one of those things
that's been around for forever.
In fact, the original RFC was written in 1985,
so that'll give you some understanding.
And it's a great protocol, it works.
You can move files from here to there with relative ease.
The problem is it's completely insecure.
That means your username, your password,
all of your commands, including your files
are sent in plain text, which although very efficient
and speed-worthy, is incredibly insecure.
Now, over the years, they've added stuff like FTP over SSL
and FTP over SSH, which are both great extensions
and actually beef up the power of the FTP protocol.
The problem is they all require an additional client
and let's be serious, if you just have a one-off
where you need to send a large file to someone
or you need to request a large file from somebody,
you don't want to have them have the overhead
of learning how to use a new client.
So for me, this is where SolarWinds Serv-U
managed file transfer really, really works.
So let me go ahead and show you what it looks like
when you request a file.
So after you log into the web portal,
you can just go to request files.
This is where you build the request.
So let's go ahead and give it a detailed name.
We'll call it video uploads.
We can give it a comment if we like.
we can put in some contact information,
including whether or not to notify me
when files have been uploaded.
I can also have Serv-U directly send to the recipients
but I'm going to skip that for now.
Next we define the expiration,
and I'm gonna leave this link available for 14 days.
Optionally, we can restrict the file sizes
and also require an additional password if necessary.
But in my example, I'm not gonna do that.
So let's go ahead and just build the request.
And this is the URL we can use to share.
Because I didn't define the actual guest accounts,
this is basically open to anybody.
Anyone who has this particular link
can upload files to your share, which is great,
especially if you're going to do a large solicitation.
If it's only going to one person,
then I'd probably recommend, go ahead and put
that person's address in the guest field.
And this page is what will be presented
to anybody who actually uses this link.
And because it's a webpage, everyone already knows
how to work with it.
So we can just go ahead and browse for a file.
Let's just grab one here, and upload.
And there we go, that file has been uploaded.
If I want to add additional files,
I can just do send more files
and keep adding to the list.
Now that's great if you want to solicit files
from other people outside your organization.
Now, if you want to do the reverse and share these files
with people outside your organization, you can also do that.
So let's go back to the console.
So just like before, from the console,
go ahead and hit send files this time.
So let's say for this example that you
are going to share a large installer file with somebody.
So let's go ahead and assign a subject.
Again, fill in the contact information
and email addresses if you want notification
and then fill in the guest email addresses
or like before, I'm gonna uncheck this so I get a link.
Let's go ahead and put an expiration of seven days.
Then we go next, and then we select our files
that we'd like to share with external parties.
We hit browse, files on my computer.
You can add more if you like and then upload.
Once the files are uploaded,
you're presented with another link.
So you can go ahead and copy this
and share it with the people
who you want access to that particular file.
And if you open that link,
there it is, the product installer.
You can go ahead and check the box and download.
So in a couple of minutes, I showed you
how to request files from parties
and also how to share files with parties.
And this is great and just a very small feature set
available in Serv-U MFT server.
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