FTP Tunnelling

Phantom234525 · February 28

Hey there, I have a File Zilla server running on localhost:21 and I want to tunnel it to an ftp server my friend can connect to from an outside network. (I am using Windows, and yes I have to use windows for other reasons unrelated to this, so I am not swapping)

Is there a relatively easy way to tunnel ftp? Cloudflare only supports SSH but I have very little experience and don't know what I'm doing

mariushm · February 28

Filezilla ftp server should support SFTP (SSH FTP ) , set it on a high port like let's say 21000 then forward it in your router and someone from outside should be able to connect to it using your external ip and that port.

edit : sorry, my bad ... it doesn't support SFTP , it supports FTPS ( ftp over tls/ssl) , and you can add your own certificates and all that.

whispous · February 28

Could we know why your friend needs to move files in and out? Because there may be a better option than opening this up to the internet.

Eigenvektor · February 29

8 hours ago, Phantom234525 said:

Cloudflare only supports SSH but I have very little experience and don't know what I'm doing

SSH allows you to easily tunnel any other protocol.

ssh user@hostname -L21:localhost:21

This will make ssh accept connections on port "21" on the local machine, and on the other end of the tunnel it will forward that to localhost:21. Because anything below port 1024 is a privileged port you may run into permission issue. So you might want to reconfigure your ftp server to use something like 2021 instead.

When this is working, your friend would point their ftp-client to localhost:21, which is in fact the SSH client. The SSH client then tunnels it to localhost:21 on the other end.

You'd still need to run an SSH server on your machine and open the SSH port to the outside world by enabling port forwarding on your modem/router.