I’ve had two issues with my life in server land. The first and most difficul to figure out due to ISP limitations is e-mail to/from my server and the second equilly difficult but not my ISP’s problem is FTP.

For those that aren’t in the know, FTP “File Transfer Protocal” is what most people/companies use to transfer large files back and forth. e-Mail however is broken down into several parts, and elude me right now. Basically you receive e-mail, process your e-mail and deliver your e-mail to the client (or hold it until the client can access it).

I’ve tried FTP from several directions. I tried to make each users’s /home directory their /var/www directory (nothing seemed to work right). I’ve tried to get Apache (the web application I use) to hand out pages via symlink (short cut to you Windows users). And the latest I tried was just to let “some” of my users have FTP access because I was allowing registered users full access to the server. This last one I REALLY didn’t like and kicked off the server days later.

So now, tonight (I’m in Great Falls, MT on TDY with the Montana Air National Guard) I remembered someone once telling me I could use rsync (I use it internally to backup/restore the web sites and media files). Well I thought I would post how I did it here so some one might bennifit from it at a later date.

I headed to ckunte.com; they’ve got a great little backup/restore tutorial that not only works local/internally but via the Internet. All you need is an ssh server/client and some files to get moved around. It goes with out saying I do not support anything Windows; but they’ve even got a way to do it when you are stuck in the expensive, crash happy, slow, hardware demanding, never ending virus attracting, patch happy, upgrade requiring shitty ass Operating Systems and Applications world of Winblows.

Here is the link at CKunte.com to learn how to use rsync to move files around through the Internet.

Hope it works as well for you as it does for me, awesome cool stuff!