lftp

The guide will show you how to use lftp to connect to your slot here at Feral via FTP/SFTP. It shouldn't require any expertise to use, but it might be helpful to read the general FTP/SFTP guide first or if you encounter a more general problem.

lftp should be usable on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Table of contents

Getting lftp

First of all you'll need to download and install lftp and the means and method to do so depend on your operating system.

Windows

There is a version of lftp for Windows which you can download and extract to a folder on your system. You should then open a PowerShell or command prompt at the bin folder, by holding down shift and right-clicking. You'll see an option in the context menu to open a PowerShell or command prompt - if you have the Windows 10 Creators Update then it'll be PowerShell, otherwise command prompt.

If you've opened a PowerShell at the bin folder, run ./lftp.exe to launch the program. If it's a command prompt you'll need to use lftp.exe.

It's also possible to install lftp with Cygwin.

macOS

Firstly, you'll need to install Homebrew using the linked-to guide. Once that's done, simply copy and paste the following to install lftp:

brew install lftp

Linux

lftp should be available in your OS's package manager:

sudo apt-get install lftp should install it on Ubuntu/Debian

sudo yum install lftp should install it on CentOS/Fedora/RHEL

sudo pacman -S lftp should install it on Arch Linux

You'll need the following information to connect:

  • Server/hostname
  • Username
  • Password

You can find each of these by clicking on the Software link of your Feral web manager.

Usage

To connect to your slot, replace server with the server given on your slot Software page, username with your FTP username and password with your FTP password before running the command below:

lftp -u username,password sftp://server

So, for example, it might be:

lftp -u user,password sftp://agrius.feralhosting.com

At the next lftp prompt, you can also run the following two commands:

set sftp:auto-confirm yes
set mirror:use-pget-n 1

These commands will auto-confirm to accept the Feral server's certificate and set the mirror command to download in a single segment. Increasing this can boost speeds if you're seeing slower-than-expected transfer rates; please be careful not to overload shared disks and increase conservatively (ideally one at a time).

Once successfully connected, you can run the following to save your connection and password for future use:

set bmk:save-passwords true
bookmark add Feral

Running a transfer

This section assumes all of the commands from above have been run. To do a transfer from your slot to home, use the following as a guide:

mirror -c -P5feral_dir local_dir

In the above command, feral_dir is replaced by the directory you wish to download and local_dir is the place you wish to put it on your slot. Note that mirror only works with directories.

Troubleshooting

I still get host key verification issues when trying to connect

You have (at least) a couple of options here:

  1. You can connect to the slot via SSH from the same machine to be able to verify the certificate
  2. You can run the option set ssl:verify-certificate no in lftp