by Recently, I set up vsftpd on RHEL5 with SSL and it was significantly easier than I had suspected it would be. I wanted to quickly share the methods I used to set up the server, test from a client, and verfiy everything was encrypted.
I chose FTPS (FTP over SSL) with vsftpd as opposed to SFTP (over SSH) for several reasons. First, I chose vsftpd because of the limits which are placed on the FTP shell. Using vsftpd also allows us to use the same service for people who have older clients that can’t use ssl. Finally, vsftpd provides handing of the umask in a way that is conducive to teams working in the same directory.