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FTP. We love it and we hate it. It has been around for a long time and will most likely continue to do so long after I’ve written this post. It has a very basic role of making files available for download from a central location. However, the FTP protocol was never meant to be secure. There are obviously ways to make uploading and downloading files from a FTP server happen over a secure line but what if you needed a way to download files from that server without any software required?
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If you’ve ever had to manage dozens upon dozens of servers or computers, I’m sure you found yourself in situations where you needed to transfer files between them.
OK, not a problem as you’ll do it over the network via network shares. But what if these machines are separated from each other via VLANs? OK, I’ll just use a good ol’ trusty USB drive. But what if you’re dealing with virtual machines in a vSphere environment with no USB redirection from your management machine to the VM? Fine, I’ll just physically plug it into the physical ESXi server and attach it to the VM. Well, still not possible as the datacenter where the servers are located is miles away and even then, USB passthrough has been disabled on the host as well! Fine! I’ll just create an ISO image and mount it! OK, that will work but are you really going to do that each every time for a couple of files? It can get tiring fast. What about just uploading to Dropbox, OneDrive or any other online hosting service? That unfortunately is also no-go as well due to restrictions of uploading client data outside of our infrastructure. Hmmm…plain ol’ FTP server hosted internally? Close, but data upload and download needs to happen securely. Geez, what about FTPS or SFTP? Close! But I need something that does not require any additional software to be installed on the client server!
At this point, you’re probably wondering just what the heck is going on here! Obviously my situation is a bit unique but if you’re looking for an extremely easy way to host your own file server that can be accessible from the Internet securely and without the need to install any additional software on the client side, then you’ll want to take a look at HFS (Http File Server). It basically checks off all the strict requirements in my scenario and best of all, it’s completely free to use, open source and takes very little configuration to get up and running!
Configuring HFS
You can download HFS from here.
HFS is a self-executable file so there’s really nothing to install. That makes this application perfect for portability as you can just dump the 2.5MB file onto a USB drive and run it on any Windows computer. In my scenario, I dumped the executable onto C:HFS.
Upon first execution, your Windows Firewall would likely alert you if you’d like to allow HFS through.
![Quick Ftp Download Quick Ftp Download](https://cdn.afterdawn.fi/screenshots/normal/16884.jpg)
Next up is the shell integration option.
You’re then dropped into the main interface. If you’ve ever used Filezilla or another similar file transfer utility, the HFS interface will feel right at home.
From either the same computer or another computer on the same network, fire up your browser and point to the IP address of your HFS server.
We don’t have any users or folders configured so it’s not much use at the moment. I’ll have a couple of users hitting our HFS server so what I’d like to do next is create a root HFS Users folder and then a subfolder for each of my users. Normally I’d create the root folder on a separate and much larger drive than C: but for this demonstration, I’ll put it under C:HFS-Root. This root folder is just for organizational purposes.
Within I have three subfolders for each of my team members. Once created, I’d right-click on the home icon, select the ‘Add folders from disk…’ option and then browse to each of my team member subfolders. I’m presented with a prompt for what kind of folder I’d like to create. I’d select the ‘Real folder’ option for each.
We now have the folders created but no users and permissions. Go to the Properties of each user’s folder and in the Permissions tab, select ‘New account’ button and create the individual user tied to this folder. In the Delete tab, select the user you’ve just created. Do the same for Upload. These options basically give full control to the user to manage his or her directory in HFS. Repeat the instructions for your other users. You’ll then notice that back in the home interface, each user’s folder icon now have a lock icon next to it. If you now refresh your browser and click on a user folder, you’ll be presented with a user name and password prompt.
Once you’re logged in as a user, the rest is pretty self-explanatory. As a privileged user, you get to create new folders, upload/delete files as well as other basic file management tasks shown in the Actions section. Unfortunately, we’re not able to upload full folders within HFS. We’d have to first manually create the folder and then upload all files to that folder. It’s essentially the same as uploading an entire folder but with just a bit more upfront work needed. Here you can see that I’ve logged in as user ‘alex’ and have created a couple of folders.
At this point, you have a fully functional HTTP file server! It was extremely simple to setup. However, two very important function is missing: external access as well as using HTTPS for security.
![Download Download](https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_app-cover-l,f_auto/p/676901c6-9b25-11e6-84f9-00163ec9f5fa/4092828339/quick-n-easy-ftp-server-screenshot.jpg)
Enabling HTTPS and External Access
By default, HFS is not secure. It uses HTTP within your browser and that’s not a good thing, especially when we need to upload and download sensitive documents to and from our HFS server. Fortunately there is a simple solution in a free utility called stunnel. It’s a very lightweight utility that helps to provide secure TLS encryption to a server without any changes or modifications needed to the existing applications already installed Basically, we’re combo’ing HFS together with stunnel to create a secure access channel to our files.
You can download stunnel from here. In most cases, you’ll download the .exe installer of whatever is the latest version.Installation is your typical Next, Next, Finish ordeal but at the end, you’re presented with a command prompt asking you for information. This is the openssl utility helping you to create your own self-signed certificate by creating your own private/public key pair. The Common Name would be the hostname you’d want the certificate to secure. The information you enter here can be whatever you want but because it is a self-signed certificate, it won’t be trusted by your browser. Therefore, we’ll be using Let’s Encrypt to create our own publicly trusted certificate afterwards.
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By default, we’d need to edit the stunnel configuration file to actually allow communication over port 443. We can do so by simply removing the commented out section in the configuration file as such. After saving the changes to the text file, exit stunnel and reopen the application. With this configuration applied, we are essentially allowing stunnel to accept connections over port 443. It will then communicate with HFS over port 80 on the same server. To be more secure, I can even block access to port 80 altogether in Windows Firewall so that no server or user can access HFS on my internal network over this port. Everything must go through stunnel port 443.
My recommendation next is to create an inbound port rule to open port 443 in Windows Advanced Firewall. Once done so, you should be able to browse to https://hfs-ip-address. There seems to be an issue using Chrome when I do this as it probably has something to do with to the self-generated certificate so try either Internet Exporer or another browser. You’ll obviously get a warning about a SSL error. This is normal as our browser doesn’t trust the certificate. However, you can see that you can now access your HFS server via HTTPS.
To get rid of that certificate error, we obviously need to use a trusted SSL certificate. You can follow my Let’s Encrypt tutorial to generate your free and publicly trusted certificate good for up to three months! You’ll need to convert your PFX certificate to PEM so one way to do that is to once again use the OpenSSL utility with the following command:
openssl pkcs12 -in certificate.pfx -out certificate.cer -nodes
Once you have your converted file, rename it to stunnel.pem. Browse to the stunnel config directory, rename the current stunnel.pem file to stunnel.pem.bak or delete it. Finally, move your new file to the directory and restart stunnel application. If all is done correctly, refresh your browser and the new certificate should be active. However, it will still show an error because of name mismatch if you used an IP address to access the server. For it work correctly, we need to now configure external access by creating a DNS A record pointing the name in our certificate with the public IP address of our server. In most cases, we’ll also need to create a port forwarding rule on our router to direct port 443 traffic to the internal IP address of our HFS server.
My domain is hosted at Bluehost so I will be creating my DNS record there:
With my record created, I now create my port forwarding rule on my router:
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Once my DNS entry has propagated, I should now be able to hit my HFS server from anywhere on the public Internet without any SSL errors! I will finally be able to upload and download files securely from any server or machine I have access to and all without having to pre-install any software. All the files are in my control since they are on a server I own so I can protect them however I see fit! The only thing to remember now is to renew your certificate every three months. Another option obviously would be to purchase a certificate that has a longer validity period. Also, you’ll want to occasionally check the HFS log file to see if there are any intrusion attempts by nefarious outsiders.
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Remember, it doesn’t take much to run HFS. If you want to host your own file server, you can easily spin up a lightweight virtual machine in AWS or Azure and go to work. If you want your files to be public, you can certainly do so as well. Simply create a public folder in HFS without any user login required for access. You can then hot link the files to your blog or website. You’ll want to obviously learn more about the various security options HFS provides before doing so but the possibility is there!