Geting a FTP server to work on your home computer can be a royal pain in the ass. This tutorial will tell you how to do it. The first thing you must do is find a ftp server program. Just google it, I'm sure you can wrap your little head around selecting a free ftp server. This is just a bare bones guide to geting your ftp server running without holding your hand.

Now the next thing to do is to get a firewall. I'm sorry, but the firewall that comes with Windows XP and Windows 7 is awful, download a free firewall. Again, I'll leave this up to your discretion. This step is very important because the next step this is very crucial. It's also crucial for the health of your computer.

Caution: NAT stands for Network address translation. IN effect, it prevents foreign packets from reaching your computer since the IP address is mostly virtual. disabling NAT gives you a real IP address that other internet users can send unsolicited requests to. If you dont have a firewall enabled on your computer or a crappy one, you can open yourself up for attack. The reason you must disable NAT to get your server running is because your computer must be able to recieve stuff over a port on TCP. This is why I explicitly told you to replace your windows firewall with a better alterntive so you can close open ports that are left vulnerable, which the Windows firewall leaves open if you noticed when you port scan your own computer

To disable NAT, go to your router or modems configuration page. This can be found by running the ipconfig command in the command window, it's IP is under gateway. Now I dont know what kind of router or modem you're using so you'll have to figure this one out on your own. Remember to renew your ip addresses, because windows doesnt ussually automatically do it after you made such a dramatic change to your network settings.

Now that you got your firewall, disabled NAT and got your ftp server up and running. Now is the time to get one of your buddies to test it out. Now dont give them admin priveleges or you're asking for it since you disabled NAT your real IP address should be shown when you type the ipconfig command in a command window. (ip address under windows xp, under windows 7 ip4 something or other) The next thing you must do is set the port. It defaults to port 21. But but you should never use ftp port 21 since hackers love ftp servers and often scan for that port for a poor sucker with it open... so set it to something like 3037 or something (googleing you can finding all the possible ranges of ports)

Now try connecting to it from a remote location. If you have no friends you could use the public library, though you might worry the librarians opening up a ftp client on their computers

So hopefully this tutorial helped you. There are ways around disabling NAT. but it requires forwarding the ports through your modem. and NAT just gets annoying when you want to serve stuff from your computer. Just be careful, or you're just asking for it