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Alternatives to FTP for uploading Reports to a web server

Sun, 2010-01-17 22:30 — rberger

People still use the totally insecure FTP to push content to webservers? I lock down FTP on all my servers. One of the main reasons its so insecure is that credentials are passed in the clear among other things.

Yet the feature of being able to automatically send Simon Reports to a remote server is a great idea.

So is there an alternative to FTP to upload reports to a server? Scp or Sftp would be my favorites. I guess WebDav would be an Apple/Mac way to do things.

FTPS if all else fails (its a super pain to configure if you aren't already supporting it in my experience).

Any plans?
Thanks
Rob

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Sun, 2010-01-17 23:00 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Alternatives to FTP for uploading Reports to a web server

The easiest solution would be for you to add a new FTP account just for the directory Simon is uploading too. With most hosting control panels, that's easy to do (and can be done for other situations too). That account would only have access to that directory, so the rest of the server would remain secure.

I would like to add other options at some point, though.

Tue, 2010-03-02 12:06 — bdperk

Re: Alternatives to FTP for uploading Reports to a web server

I want to publish an RSS report to a remote server. The host prefers that all content update is done vis SFTP. In reading the above I'm assuming that I must use FTP?

Tue, 2010-03-02 12:15 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Alternatives to FTP for uploading Reports to a web server

Yes, the Reports feature uses FTP to upload reports.

In the future I'd like to add more secure upload options, but for now that's the only choice.

Though as a workaround you could save the report locally then perhaps have a Script-based test to upload it securely.