FTP over SSL (FTPS): FTP is a protocol for transferring files over a network — you are probably already familiar with it, or have at least heard of it. FTP over SSL is simply a means of doing FTP over a secured, encrypted connection. After the act of logging in, the experience of using FTPS is the same as with FTP.

The AMNH Research webserver uses explicit FTPS with a clear data channel. This means that it operates over the same network ports as FTP and it uses SSL to encrypt your password when it is sent to the server. There is no slowdown for the actual file transfers because the data-transfer part of the session is not encrypted.

One of the nice things about FTPS is that you are probably already using an FTP program that supports it. Current versions of some of the most popular clients (e.g. WS_FTP, Fetch, Cyberduck, SmartFTP) support it.

There are a number of free and commercial FTP client programs that support FTPS. Here are some free ones:

• SmartFTP (Windows) (free for educational/non-profit use)
• Cyberduck (Mac OS X)
• gFTP (Linux, Unix, incl. Mac OS X if you run Fink)

And here are some commercial ones:

• WS_FTP (Windows)
• Fetch (Mac OS X)

This is not an exhaustive list, but there are more options here.

We have tested FTP/SSL access with SmartFTP and Cyberduck, with success. Both of these are available free of charge.

Settings to use with FTP over SSL:

• Host name (a.k.a server name): research-staging.amnh.org. You could use the staging name of your site (e.g. library-staging, cladistics-staging, hp-staging, whatever) but you will get a warning about the name on the SSL certificate not matching the name of the server. This will not prevent it from working, but may be an annoyance.
• Authentication type (if you're given a choice): The terminology you're presented with may vary, but you want "AUTH TLS," "explicit," or "FTPES." Do not use "implicit."
• FTP mode: choose "passive" or leave this at your program's default and let it figure it out.
• Network ports: These should be left at their defaults, or left blank.
• User name and password: Use your LDAP user name and password. (Same as your AMNH email).

SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) and Secure Copy (SCP) are related programs for encrypted communications between networked computers. SFTP and SCP are actually related to SSH and are often packaged together. They allow you to log in to a server computer and type commands (SSH) or to transfer files between computers (SCP). If you are familiar already with telnet and FTP, you may think of them as replacements for these protocols. (Technically, they are replacements for rsh and rcp, if you've heard of those.) Additionally, there is a program called rsync that can serve as a wrapper for scp to replicate entire directory trees between computers.

SSH, like telnet, lets you log into a remote computer and execute commands. The difference, though, is that everything gets encrypted, including your password. That way, if someone somewhere on the internet is eavesdropping on your connection they probably won't be able to steal your password and exploit it by breaking into the server. SCP lets you transfer files, with the same benefit. Finally, SFTP is an interactive program like FTP that works over an SSH connection.

For a list of client programs that you can use for SFTP, see above under "FTP over SSL." All of those mentioned above also support SFTP. In addition, you may want to try WinSCP (Windows), or Fugu (Mac) which support SFTP but not FTP over SSL.