Allowing friends to upload to a folder

[Peace Freak]

I am using a hosting company to host my website. One of my friends would like to send me some large files.

Is there a way I can create a folder within my site that he can FTP the files into yet not be able to access the rest of my site?

Thanks in advance...

[JD]

This is a question for your hosting provider, to be honest, but I would think that you could set up another FTP account and have it configured to be chained to a particular directory. There is nothing you can do with Yummy FTP - it can't create or configure user accounts.

[spacific]

If you are the administrator of the web-site you should have been given access to admin software (e.g. cpanel) which you can access through a webpage. From there you can set up new accounts and restrict them to whatever folder you wish. You can also monitor memory and bandwidth usage, look at statistics for your site, do some file maintenance, even read your mail, etc.

[Peace Freak]

Thanks for the quick responses and ideas. I have access to the C Panel but I am not sure how to do it so I will contact my hosting company.

[paulc]

Oh there's a MUCH better way! Just make a secure FTP Alias in Yummy and give your friend the applet. By choosing "secure" nobody who gets the applet will know your user id or password. Or have access to anything in your web  area. All they will see is a progress dialog.

What I did was to create a folder in my web area called "incoming." I had the applet go into that folder. Using the applet, files go up to your site, into that folder. If you want to give access to such files to others, just send out a URL like:

"www.<your_domain_address>/incoming/<file_to_get.ext>"

[JD]

Gosh, darnit! Yes!

How on earth I didn't think of that is beyond me - a great big DOH! for me. Thanks, paulc

[spacific]

Well, it does require your friends to be running Mac OSX. No good for Windows or Linux users.

I had considered this for one job I had but some of those involved were on Windows and so I had to set up the special access anyway.

(Incidentally, is the alias a universal binary? If not then there's another restriction.)

Just noticed that the quick help says "FTP Aliases can be copied to another Mac, so long as Yummy FTP is installed there
too."  Am I missing something here, I thought alias and applet were the same thing and that it ran independent of Yummy?

[JD]

FTP Aliases since v1.6 are totally self contained, which means that if Yummy FTP is not installed they will still work to do their uploads. They are also Universal Binaries since version 1.5. I need to update the documentation!

As far as the Windows/Linux users are concerned, here's yet another reason to switch to a Mac!

[spacific]

Or produce Windows versions!  No doubt you don't want to go down that path, but actually it wouldn't be too difficult as your alias is  virtually a windowless, user-interface-less application. The algorithms and logic you are using to cope with different server types and responses would be identical; all you need are a few calls to the relevant Windows API functions to access the network stuff ...
That would make the FTP aliases 10 times as useful!
 

[dave_r]

I'll just say this works really well in a professional environment too.  You can send the alias to any munchkin with a mac and they'll send you back what you've asked for without any fuss or muss.  I use this software front and back, I don't know how I ever worked without it.  Thanks JD!

Dave