No, no... no serial/parallel connections when you can use network cards. Much faster and painless. PCMCIA ones work like a charm. There's a lot of different ftp servers on Aminet (search "ftpd"), most should work also in Miami even when instructions are usually for AmiTCP/IP relatives. Stacks are always pretty similar, just find where the wanted configs are.
One option is to mount shared folder from PC to your Amiga with smbfs. It's just one small exe for your Amiga, no need for full samba installation. But if you download files with PC then it of course would be easier to transfer files with it all the way to Amiga too. Your original idea with ftpd on Amiga suits for that indeed.
