Suggestions? A small webserver for file upload
List, good afternoon,
What package would list members suggest for a small webserver that
would enable co-workers to upload files to us?
We exchange files with people we work with through email and
attachments - that normally works well. During a recent weekend, a
co-worker's email service failed and we were unable to receive several
files. Fortunately, their email outage was repaired in 6 hours so we
didn't lose too much time. During the outage I did look around for
possible solutions and determined that we'd prefer to have:
(i) our own webserver, preferably simple to set up and operate
(ii) able to present a few simple unscripted 'about us' type of pages
(ii) a file upload facility, but with some important (to us)
restrictions, including:
(a) access for upload only after entry of pre-assigned username and
password
(b) file upload into a nominated-by-us directory by that logged-in
user, and with write-only permissions, if that were possible, so that
any access breach through another method would not enable access to
any uploaded files
(c) access by us to all uploaded files, for inspection and
subsequent transferring to appropriate file-system users or directories
(d) file upload facility to be able to be disabled by us - this
would be the normal state - and enabled solely on emergency occasions
such as counter-party email failures
As I understand it (I've previously prepared a few simple webpages so
have a rudimentary understanding of HTML) we would need a script to
perform the upload. A package that provided some scripting ability
would be helpful, most especially if the package documentation would
also cover the scripting aspects, that would be very helpful. Though
there are alternative well-known methods of providing remote file
upload, most of our co workers are using Windows systems equipped only
with a browser and some office suites. We do not want to enable SSH
logins (the co-workers probably do not have access to, nor know how to
use, SSH; neither do we want to employ FTP because of both the large
number of inbound ports that may have to be opened, and (again)
possible difficulties for co workers in establishing an FTP link from
their Windows system, especially when behind a partially-restricted FW
and NAT. Email works well for them, and so does http.
We have a couple of Debian machines we could run this application on,
Wheezy and Squeeze. What would people's preferred webserver package
be for this type of application?
regards, Ron
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