SphereFTP is a small, simple and secure FTP server for Windows XP, and Windows CE platforms. Not to be confused with the Sphere (game) Server. It is very light weight and can run as an application or as an NT service. It is configured via the registry editor.

Check out the filezilla server as well.

The development of SphereFTP began with the need to access some of the files on my home computer from the Internet. I could find no simple and secure FTP servers to do the job. The FTP server service with windows does not allow fine control over access of files without major complexity. It does not show in a simple concise way which users are allowed to which files. The Windows security model is very unwieldy for simple tasks.

I looked over the internet for FTP servers. WarFTP seemed the most feature full. I got burned very badly by it’s security holes. With many features comes many bugs. A security bug in my version of WarFTP allowed anonymous users to LIST any file on my system. Not cool. Time to write my own.

Features:

• This program (at least this version 1.4) is Freeware. Feel free to use it however you like.
• Compliant with RFC 765 return codes and features.
• A single thread finite state machine architecture that has been tested to handle hundreds of simultaneous connections.
• Acts as an NT service by simply running it at a Command Line prompt with the arguments of -Install or -Uninstall.
• 2 Log files of High and Low details are kept. They are renamed daily. Lookup and log of client host names.
• Resumes broken downloads and uploads.
• Limits the total number of connections. Limits the number of connections and non-logged in connections per IP to prevent Dos attacks. Checks for, logs and blocks password attacks.
• A simple list of users and group accesses. All user information is stored in the registry. Assuming no-one has access to your computers registry, the users, passwords and access restrictions are completely secure. Very simple. Users can be created with a password and assigned to a group which will be that users root. The groups have access to a directory and have read, write, create permissions. Groups may have any number of subgroups which appear as subdirectories to that group. Use REGEDIT to edit the \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Menasoft\SphereFTP registry sub-tree. This allow multiple users to have multiple overlapping access to the file system in a fairly simple way.
• SphereFTP has been ported to Windows CE 3.0 as well. If anyone is interested in a CE build of SphereFTP for X86, ARM, MIPS, or PowerPC please send me email. I’ve found ActiveSync can be very unreliable and complex and did not work satisfactorily in almost any configuration.

Requested Features:

• NT event log support
• Restrict account to IP or host name.
• Block IP ranges? leave this to a router?
• Pretty dialogs for configuring users, groups, and options.
• Nice real time display of current clients and log of activities.

Links to Compairable Products: (We try to be fair)

• FTP Serv-U
• WarFTP
• Microsoft FTP Service
• Titan FTP Server
• PeerFTP

Download: