Now this was a funny challenge. I have a hard drive-less laptop (it’s in the mail, people) and a need for an FTP server. It seemed like a good idea to try and set up a very lightweight FTP server on it, using the live CD and a static IP address.

Don’t ask me why, but I used vsftpd to get it going. Port forwarding was a snap, but configuring vsftpd to allow non-anonymous logins was a bit tricky. I chalk that up to inexperience, though.

I use a USB drive to hold the configuration files, so I don’t have to retype them each time. And believe it or not, it works like a champ.

The downside is that Xubuntu, in its desktop flavor, seems to carve out part of the system memory, which makes it ineffective for storing stuff. It seems like rather than reserving say, 128Mb for the system, it actually picks something like 85 percent.

Which means a 300Mhz laptop with 256Mb of memory only has about 32Mb leftover for storing uploaded files. Xubuntu reports there’s something like 100Mb used, but free -m shows only 32Mb left, and uploaded files stop around the 30Mb mark.

I might have to hit the forums for a way to get around that.