WU-FTPD issues on RedHat 7.3
 

I'm currently running RedHat 7.3 on an old P450, which is hooked up to a LAN. I want to have an FTP server running so that I can access my Linux box from my Windows-running-laptop, whether that be over the LAN or over the 'net. I'm not worried about multiple users, etc. - I just want the final product to allow me personally to log on, and I'll be happy. To that end, I finished installing WU-FTPD yesterday, and I'm pretty certain that the server is running. My problem is that I can't seem to connect to the server from another machine.

If I ftp in to "localhost" from the machine running the server, then I can log in and it looks like business as usual. But running WinXP on another machine and trying to connect over my LAN (or via the 'net) gives me a "Connection reset by peer" or "A connection with the server could not be established" error message.

After perusing some other threads on the forum for advice on similar problems to my own, I ran "netstat -a" and I do indeed have a line like "tcp *:ftp LISTEN", if that helps.

In short, I'm really not sure as to why the server isn't hearing (or at least isn't acknowledging) any incoming requests over port 21, despite "listening" on that port. Colour me confused - but any help would greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
- Llama

Do you have firewall running?

From LAN, are you connecting via internal IP address? From the 'net', if you're behind a router you would need to "port forward" for this to work.

Hmm, that's all I can think of. I can't think of anything else right now why it wouldn't let you connect over LAN.

-twantrd

I'm using a LinkSys router, so yeah, that has a firewall going. I have no idea if the Linux box itself is running a software firewall, though. If that's your question, I'm not sure where to look to find out about the latter.

And I am indeed using both internal and 'external' IPs, and neither work. ftp://192.168.x.x gives me an error, just as ftp://<MyActualIP> does. I have port forwarding set up, but that's not going to do much until the server itself is responding to FTP requests from other machines, particularly those on the same LAN.

- Llama

Aha! A bit of an update on my ignorance. I'm using KDE on my Linux machine, and after poking around the Programs Menu ("Start Menu" - is there a Linux equivalent term?) I found the Firewall Configuration. I opened up the FTP ports and, lo and behold, the FTP server works! My only concern is that I may have made my system insecure - I saved a backup of my /etc/sysconfig/ipchains file before making the changes to my firewall settings, and now in comparing the two files, I'm noticing radical differences. I'm wondering if this is going to be bad news for me, or if I shouldn't worry about it?

Just as a quick side note - wu-ftpd has several vulnerabilities. I would stronly reccomend vsftpd or proftpd.

So I've heard! In reading through some other WU-FTPD related posts on this forum, I don't think that I have yet encountered a thread that didn't have at least one warning about the many vulnerabilities! =)

So I've been thinking about switching over to more secure server software, like one of the two you mentioned, but I'm wondering (and this is perhaps a remnant of my Windows frame of mind) if there is any "uninstall" process that I should go through. I've muddled my way through installing a few standalone software packages on Linux, but I have yet to actually get rid of anything aside from some random files, just using rm. Is there any special process I should go through in order to entirely remove WU-FTPD from my system, or will it suffice to simple rm its directory?

Cheers!
- Llama

If you installed it from an rpm:
rpm -e wu-ftpd

If it was from source then from the wu-fptd src directory run:
make uninstall

I'm 99% sure I installed it from source, so going to /wu-ftpd-2.6.2/src I run:

make uninstall

which gives me:

make: *** No rule to make target 'uninstall'. Stop.

Hum. Is there a certain "rule" file that I should be looking for, and then running "make uninstall" in that directory? I've found the Makefile and Makefile.in files, which I would have assumed to be a good place to start, but trying to run "make uninstall" from their directory gives me the same error message.

Cheers,
- Llama