SFTP server minimum requirements

[Bob1979]

Hi All!

Just looking for a little help;

I'm thinking of building a small SFTP server, with a maximum of 6 concurrent users, however I've never done server work before, so I'm just looking for some advice (I'm going to build it myself if I can, however pre-built hardware configurations are also appreciated).

The server will be primarily be used to transfer small word, excel, png's etc., to remote computers; these computers won't be on my home network.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Almost nothing. If it can run Debian, and has a network card, and enough storage...

A Raspberry Pi with a large SD card or an external drive would be plenty.

Biggest thing is that if you want serious transfer speeds (more than a couple of MB/s), you'll probably need something with gigabit ethernet, and a native SATA drive or USB3.0.

If you're exposing it to the internet, I strongly suggest you disable password access and use public key authentication.

 

[Bob1979]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I was hoping this would be the answer; I've been looking at the new Raspberry Pi 3.0, but I wasn't sure if it would be good enough.

Transfer speeds won't be an issue, as the documents will be very small, and the HDD won't be very big either (I'm looking at a max of 64GB - No movie's etc, nor any streaming of any kind).

With regards to security; I was looking into SSL certificates from Go-Daddy, would this be sufficient in your opinion?

OS-wise, I was looking to use something free, like Ubuntu; I was looking at this: "https://www.solid-run.com/product/cubox-i4x4/" as a possible solution.

Thanks!

Bob.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

SSL certs are someone else verifying your server is who it says it is - mainly webservers. You don't need them, because you control each end. They also don't help with ensuring that only people you allow access to can access the server.

Look into SSH public keys - SFTP is basically moving files via SSH; all the authentication is the same.

Debian is what Ubuntu is based on - it's free. Raspbian is the official RPi flavour of Debian, also free.

The only thing you should need to spend money on is hardware.

I just checked, and I get about 2.5MB/s from/to a cheap-ish SD card in a first-gen RPi. With decent storage, you could easily get far more than that - bottleneck would be the 100Mb/s ethernet controller (~10MB/s after overhead).

 

[Bob1979]

Many thanks for the help;

I'm going to go for something Pi-esque, and look into the SSH public keys, as you recommended!

Bob.