FTP stopped working - resend

[Jay O'Brien]

(Resent as I didn't get a copy)

Giorgos and Derek, 

Thank you for your replies. I don't know what happened, but all of 
a sudden ftp started working again. It could have been the Win XP 
machine I was using to access ftp on my server, I don't know. It 
was working fine, using WS_FTP Pro, to my other servers over the 
internet, but it wouldn't work here on its own LAN. I looked at 
xferlog, and saw that connection lines were entered, but the FTP 
LOGIN line wasn't there. Now that it is working, both lines show up 
in xferlog, as before. 

Giorgos, thanks for the example commands; All agree with your 
example returns except 'netstat -na | fgrep LISTEN | grep [:.]21', 
which returns 'grep: No match'. Am I missing something here? Thanks 
for the troubleshooting steps, I will review those commands and see 
what they do for me.

Giorgios, you say "Stability is nice, isn't it? :)". Yes. But the 
problem is that it works so well for so long that I forget all I ever 
knew, and now it is obvious that I should update the system. I guess 
it's time to dust off the FreeBSD hat.

Darek, It stopped working before I rebooted, and I have done literally 
nothing to this machine, except use Apache and ftp, for nearly a year.
What is frustrating is that the problem went away!

What now concerns me is that I did not receive a copy of my own post 
on this problem from the mailing list server, and I didn't get Giorgos' 
cc sent to freebsd-questions at freebsd.org. I used to get my posts back, 
but that was before I changed to this gmail account. If I don't receive 
this post, I'll go after that as a different problem. My ftp problem is 
"gone", but now a mailing list problem?

Thanks again for the assistance.

Jay O'Brien
Rio Linda, California, USA


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: FTP stopped working
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 10:06:46 +0200
From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida at ceid.upatras.gr>
To: Jay O'Brien <jayobrien at gmail.com>
CC: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
References: <43C2146B.4060806 at gmail.com>

On 2006-01-08 23:44, Jay O'Brien <jayobrien at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm embarassed to say that FreeBSD was working so good for me
> that I forgot how to make it work. It was up for over 300 days
> when I rebooted today.

Oops :)

> All of a sudden I cannot access the computer via ftp. I have
> been able to do so using WS_FTP Pro on my Windows CP Pro
> computer, but now it doesn't even seem to accept the connect.
> The connect is via a local LAN, using fixed IPs.
>
> Guidance in a troubleshooting mode would really be appreciated.

First check that you truly have the ftpd binary:

    root at flame:/root# ls -l /usr/libexec/ftpd
    -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  96360 Jan  8 13:00 /usr/libexec/ftpd

Then see if ftpd is supposed to start as 'standalone' or as a
service controlled by inetd:

    root at flame:/root# grep ftp /etc/rc.conf
    root at flame:/root# grep inetd /etc/rc.conf
    inetd_enable="YES"
    root at flame:/root# pgrep inet
    651
    root at flame:/root# grep '^[[:space:]]*ftp' /etc/inetd.conf
    ftp     stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/libexec/ftpd       ftpd -l

If inetd is running, pgrep should report its PID as above.
Seeing no PID means that inetd failed to start.  Your system logs
at /var/log/messages will almost certainly have clues about the
reason of the failure.

Then, start checking if something *is* listening at port 21:

    root at flame:/root# netstat -na | fgrep LISTEN | grep [:.]21
    tcp4       0      0  *.21                   *.*                    LISTEN
    root at flame:/root# sockstat -4 -l -p 21
    USER     COMMAND    PID   FD PROTO  LOCAL ADDRESS         FOREIGN ADDRESS
    root     inetd      651   5  tcp4   *:21                  *:*
    root at flame:/root#

If you don't have any indication how ftpd was started it's possible that
you manually fired up ftpd and then promptly forgot about it, until you
had to reboot.  Stability is nice, isn't it? :)


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: FTP stopped working
Date: 	Mon, 09 Jan 2006 10:29:58 -0600
From: 	Derek Ragona <derek at computinginnovations.com>
To: 	Jay O'Brien <jayobrien at gmail.com>
References: 	<43C2146B.4060806 at gmail.com>

Jay,

By default ftp logs in the system log so tail that log file as you try
to ftp.  That should point you to the problem.

As it was working until you rebooted, what changed before the reboot? 
Did you add tcp wrappers or other security measures?

        -Derek