using SSH (scp) to transfer files

Anon

Hello all,

I use scp regularly (including an app for win called PUTTY if I don't have
an available Linux mache) to copy files from my home computer to the
servers.

What I want to do is to enable a few employees to get some files
once they have successfully loged into the system and to provide a password
for only a few to actually upload the files with their correspondent
descriptions which I would save on a MySQL table.

Originally I thought I should set up a FTP server and used PHP's ftp functions to transfer files. A user would have to fill in a form with the file description in order to upload it and could have access to the files for download. My servers have SSH running already and I wouldn't like to set up a ftp server. If anyone can help me with that I would apreciate. Thank you.

regards,

C.F.

Anon

you can easily just run a system call to get this working.

try something like:
<?php
$fileToCopy = $PASSED_file;
system("scp $fileToCopy user@host:/path/to/$fileToCopy");
?>

One problem here is that SCP prompts you for a password. A workaround is to use something called "skeygen". Run it as whatever user on both boxes. Then do this:

scp ~/.ssh/authorized_keys user@host:/your/home/dir/.ssh/

Once you copy over the authorized_keys file from the server to the place where the files are going... you should be all set. 'scp' will just run.

Rob

Anon

Rob,

Thank you very much!

What I really did not understand is this : I want to transfer the file(s) to the user's browser as if it was a simple donwload. The user won't see what is going behind the scenes. The part on how to pass the password was not clear to me. How is the right syntax? For instance, I need to transfer the file reports.zip to the user and have him save it as if it was a file download that he would normaly perform with his browser.

So the user would click on a HTML list of available files and there description, extracted from a MySQL table. Once he clicks on a file name the transfer will take place.

What about uploads? How would you suggest?

Thank you,

C.F.