Redhat 9 breaks VSFTPD

I upgraded bunter to Redhat 9 last week. This was probably not a good idea. I hoped I’d really be getting 8.1 with a fancy upgrade inducing name. Instead it seems that they did make some real changes as well.

One of them was to the vsftpd.conf file. They turned on anonymous logins and turned off local user logins, and set it up to run as a daemon rather than from xinetd. And moved the file from /etc/ to /etc/vsftpd. But other than that, they didn’t change anything. Including the entry for it in xinetd.d. With the result that after I upgraded, vsftpd was running in default (paranoid) mode. So I change vsftpd.conf and nothing changes. Then I check the man page and discover it’s not seeing the file. So I edit vsfptd in xinetd.d, and the sucker starts crashing. So I check the vsftpd.conf man page and that’s when I discover that it’s in daemon mode. So here’s the changers:

/etc/xinetd.d/vsftpd: add the line ‘server_args /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf’

/etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf changers:

listen=NO
anonymous_enable=NO
local_enable=YES

and now your local users (who are of course all remote) can ftp to their html directories again.

9 thoughts on “Redhat 9 breaks VSFTPD”

  1. Thank God!! I wasn’t the only one who ran into this problem. The Redhat Documentation is pretty vague. After working through several ftp server checklists I found online on ‘how to setup vsftpd with xinetd’ and still getting the “anonymous server only” error, I was about ready to kill someone… I finally realised that the vsftpd.conf just wasn’t getting seen, when it went through xinetd, and there had to be something to that.

    Google “vsftpd.conf xinetd redhat” brought me here… and lo “server_args” indeed. I suppose I should have found it in the man page, but Thanks just the same!

    Reply
  2. hello. i have a similar but completely different problem maybe you can fix… when i upgraded my machine i am no longer able to make accounts in the fashion

    adduser XXX -g 420 -s /sbin/nologin -d /home/null

    as i keep getting: 500 OOPS: chdir
    !logon failure so quiting

    but if i do user: adduser XXX -g 420
    it works and i can change dirs just fine. i dislike this as i would like to be able to make just users for the ftp are able to log into the ssh.

    Reply
  3. I found that
    useradd -s /sbin/nologin -d /var/ftp
    works good. Users can’t ssh to the box, but they can still get into the ftp server.

    Reply
  4. Hello,

    I had Mandrake 8.1 and just installed RedHat 9. The command adduser snoopy -g users returns an error message (bash: adduser: command not found). What did I make wrong? Thx for replying…

    Reply
  5. I have a problem with vsftpd, I am a Nube but I wanted to do soemthing that seemd simple enough, set up and FTP so that I can remotly access my files at school. I had a problem, I got started vsftpd with the server tool. Everything looked right in the vsftp.conf and I changed local_login = yes becasue I wanted to test it. I loged on with my windows computer just fine and it sees the ip adress but when it goes to download the file lists, it can’t find anything, so I thought that it was just because nothing was in /var/ftp/pub, so I put a file there, and no success, I asked a friend is he could try it out and he coudln’t find anything. I tried to follow xinted.d but I just got lost, becides I figured that if the FTP actuily was working… I don’t know whats wrong with it. BTW anon users can access. Also I was wondering what directory I was in if I log on as anon and I see a /, I am fairly sure that is not root, thank you so much ~Ben

    Reply
  6. Hello,

    I have the same problem with cuteftp and another client i forgot the name. I can’t got the file list of the FTP server. I don t know what’s wrong, but i install filezilla on windows and it works well.
    Filezilla is free so may be you can install it at your school.

    Reply

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