It should be noted that this is weakens your computer's security. Anonymous ftp means that anyone one the Internet can then access the designated folder and add or remove files.

Of course, there is very little that could be done to actually attack your Mac via ftp. To my knowledge (which is admittedly limited), about all a malicious person could do is upload a file to your computer and then give people the link to download the file, resulting in all your bandwidth suddenly being consumed without your knowledge so that the other person can distribute a file for free. If this is not a major concern for you, the benefits of anonymous ftp might easily outweigh the risks—for me, it seems quite worth it.

Thanks to the original poster for the nice, clear instructions!

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You are mostly right with regards to the risk of enabling anonymous FTP. But there is always the possibility that there will be a security hole in the ftp daemon that Apple ships that could allow execution of arbitrary code. As of now, there are no known issues, but that doesn't mean one couldn't crop up at some point. And Apple is somewhat slow to address these types of vulnerabilities--in comparison to the Linux and *BSD worlds, that is. (They still do better than Microsoft in this regard.)

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Pureftpd Manager was recently updated to version 1.8 to work with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

http://jeanmatthieu.free.fr/pureftpd/index.html

This allows setting up anonymous FTP as well as users

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can somebody confirm that FTP mounts in the finder are now read *and* writable? I am still on 10.5. If I remember this false FTP implementation for the Finder is a bug since 10.0 ...

Cheers, Helge

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