[lug] VSFTP stopped working recently

[Richard Mandel]

I dug into the logs and could find nothing of interest, but did discover two
issues:
1) there was a second firewall active that I didn't even know was there. It
had no entry for the non-standard port I was trying to use for FTP. I
disabled this second firewall.
2) the first firewall works fine with the non-standard port I am using, or
at least I can get through to the VSFTP server.
3) But there seems to be an issue with VSFTPD and non-standard FTP ports and
PASV mode.
	a. Passive mode works fine when VSFTPD uses the default port
	b. When LISTEN_PORT is set to 301, in vsftpd.conf, for example, if
the router and firewall are properly set, I can get access to the server
using an FTP client, but it hangs on attempts to enter PASV mode. The server
uses its private address and PASV mode fails.
		Response:	227 Entering Passive Mode
(192,168,xxx,xxx,223,22).
		Status:	Server sent passive reply with unroutable address.
Using server address instead.
	c. Results are the same when I define PASV_ADDRESS=xx.xx.xx.xx (my
server's static ip address)

I think I am going to abandon this effort to use a non-standard FTP
port..............

Richard Mandel
Linux Support Guys

richard at linuxsupportguys.com
Phone, Mobile and SMS: +1-303-499-1525

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces at lug.boulder.co.us [mailto:lug-bounces at lug.boulder.co.us]
On Behalf Of David L. Anselmi
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2012 11:04 PM
To: Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List
Subject: Re: [lug] VSFTP stopped working recently

Richard Mandel wrote:
> Oct 31 08:33:01 server2 kernel: [84534.736252] init: vsftpd main 
> process ended, respawning Oct 31 08:33:01 server2 kernel: 
> [84534.742050] init: vsftpd respawning too fast, stopped

It's broke.  If it doesn't have a log file to look at start it by hand (if
nothing else you can read the init script to figure out how, or put set +x
in it to see what it would do if it's still shell based).

Probably it will tell you why it won't start and then you can fix it.
Failing that, compare your config file to the default and see what's changed
enough that it won't run.

You may have a log that shows what was updated when (aptitude does).  You
can use the old/new version to look for bug reports or change logs that say
what the incompatibility is.  Seems unlikely that a recent update for 12.04
would break anything though.

Dave
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