Linux

It is amazing that FTP is still widely used and even promoted (by inaction and implication) by most commercial web hosts. Using FTP to send files to your web server, and even having the FTP service running on your web server is equivalent to making banking transactions without SSL enabled - the door is almost wide open and you could be setting yourself up for disaster.

SSH

SSH has been around for a long time and there are now many commercial and freeware tools that enable you to get at least the same functionality as you have always had from your FTP server but without the risk. Notably, you need to generate and use a private/public key pair to make your SSH connection water-tight. Using any SSH capable application such as PUTTY to connect to your remote server, or locally in your Linux machine, you can generate a key pair base don a paraphrase using the following command.

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

Taking SSH to the next level

There is a small commercial application called SFTPdrive {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SftpDrive} that enables windows and Mac users to configure remote machine-resources to be accessible like network drives mapped to be accessible locally. You do not have to pay for this feature if you have the skill and patience of configuring a tunneling setup with Putty (SSH tunneling), and map drives through the tunnel

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Linux Distribution is available

If you are already using the upto now latest version of Drupal (7.04 Feisty Fawn), this upgrade will quick and painless. At least I am sure that it will be painless while the quick part will depend on the power of your processor and your internet connection. In Fiesty Fawn (and probably in other older versions), a notice will appear at the top of the regular update window informing you that a new distribution of Ubuntu is available for download. If you opt to upgrade as opposed to just installing the available updates, you will launch the update process with the following progress dialogue.

If you have my kind of luck, you might see the following message which is most probably a result of congested networks due to everyone rushing to upgrade their Ubuntu computers to the latest distribution.

Failed to fetch http://www.kiberpipa.org/~gandalp/ubuntu/feisty/cinelarra/i686/./Packages.gz 404 Not Found

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