Why their an ftp server in ubuntu 8.10 running by default? Also it is on the local network. it only says it works! when you acsess it on a web browser? How do you disable it and why is it running?

???? sounds crazy, I don't deal with Ubuntu much but I wouldn't think it'd have an FTP server enabled by default, might be worth checking /etc/init.d/ see if their is a script their that will allow you to stop it, generally I'd take a guess at their being a script in somewhere like rc.2 (can't remember path to it off the top of my head) that is loading it up. If you got a firewall, block port 21 and that'd atleast stop anyone being able to access ftp. I dunno much about ubuntu to tell you if this is intended but I would take a guess at that it is not.

there is no ftp by default. maybe you added one by mistake during the install

I used umit to scan my computer and port 80, 110 and 2500 is running and i blocked them all on firestarter? WTF? Also I just checked that Apache 2.2.9 is running with the webserver checker in firefox.

it was running and installed and i got rif of it but still running?

what did you get rid of? please try to provide more detail where possible. note that uninstalling a package doesn't necessarily take it out of memory.

80 is standard to have open as it's the http port, also a number of distributions have apache running by default. I am guessing the ftp server was installed by accident, without knowing the server daemon tho it's hard to say how to shut it down as such, perhaps "ps aux | grep ftp" might be able to find out?

80 TCP ya that is obvious, sorry but i know that and servers well but I want to say I did try to experiment with it at the beginning but I thought I got rid of it. It is a pain to get rid of it though? Its gone for now I was planning to put it in a virtual machine but does anyone know any apache web server manager I found a few but not many features that I can manage I know it can do more like a static ip to the web but any manager only localy? oh well thanks for the support from the community and props to everyone who moved from windows or mac to linux. A quote from me "Information should be free because humankind can't evolve without everyone evolving informaion by making it better, without linux where would opensource be, SCARY THOUGHT!!!!!"

i too seem to have some kind of default ftp server running on ubuntu 10.04 , and previously before i upgraded from 8.04
right from the start i have been able to sftp to my server box and if i add a user they also are able to do the same i installed vsftpd at one time to enable an anonymous ftp account which worked ,but now i want to add a user who is chrooted to his home directory ive searched and tried to find out how but all advice altering vsftpd settings dosnt seem to work any user i add has the ability to ftp allready .i have sudo apt get uninstalled vsftpd but i still have access through ftp ?? im puggled.
i had a look through init.d and cant see any other ftp type programs
i used this tutorial to originally setup the box
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ph...rver-for-free/
is sftp not ftp?

sftp is very much NOT ftp, they can achieve similar ends, and sftp implements a user command set that would be recognisable from ftp, but they are not the same protocol whatsoever. It's very standard to run ssh on a server by default - it's simple and very secure and useful, and ssh will, by default, run the sftp subsystem as part of it, but an ftp client is absolutely no use whatsoever to connect to it, only an sftp / scp client will be of use.

thats where my confusion was then - both my ftp clients support sftp - filezilla, and fireftp firefox addon. i by default chose sftp when connecting as i thought it was just a more secure ftp(like ssl or tls). i have tried connecting through plain ftp and vsftpd takes over and works as i expected it to - chrooting people etc. thanks for clarifying that