Tag Archives: wordpress

Setting up FTPS using vsftpd for WordPress plugins auto upgrade

Posted by Praveen Kumar on May 31, 2009 12 comments

One of the handy features in the latest WordPress is the support to upgrade plugins in one click through the WordPress administration interface. It needs FTP or FTPS access to the server where you have hosted your WordPress installation. But turning on FTP for users (non-anonymous) is a bad idea. Using FTP involves transferring user passwords as plain text during authentication. This is a great security concern and the primary reason for why one shouldn’t turn on FTP for user accounts. However, WordPress also supports FTPS, FTP over SSL. This shouldn’t be confused with SSH FTP or Secure FTP. FTPS uses TLS or SSL for authentication and commands. Let us see how to setup FTPS on a server using vsftpd.

Step 1: Install vsftpd

Using the package manager for your distribution, install vsftpd. On Debian and Ubuntu, it can be installed by the following command.

$ sudo apt-get install vsftpd

Step 2: Configure FTPS

Edit /etc/vsftpd.conf and do the following.

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Breaking a long silence!

Posted by Praveen Kumar on March 28, 2008 2 comments

I have been a highly inactive blogger these days. It doesn’t mean that I have too many things to take care of. For some reason, I felt that I lost interest in blogging for some time now. Every week I would have found at least a couple things to write about. I would also start a new post. However, I would end up canceling it after I had typed a few lines. Maybe I turned too lazy to write something. But not anymore! I decided to break the long period of inactivity.

As a part of the new start, I have just upgraded my journal to use WordPress 2.5. I have also decided to throw away my old clumsy theme. I temporarily use the “WordPress Classic” theme. I am planning to tweak the same theme to match my color preferences. I am also thinking if I should try modifying the “WordPress Default” theme to use fluid width and use it. But I won’t be doing it before next weekend. I would reserve a couple of posts to talk about WordPress 2.5 and my thoughts about WordPress theming.

What it means is that you (looks like I have at least 10 regular readers of my blog still) would be seeing regular activities in my journal from now on. I am also curious to know about the ones who are subscribed to my feed. If you don’t mind, please leave me a comment. Thanks for your support, readers!