I have openssh on one of my conputers, but I want to run a real FTPD on it, 2 questions.

1) what port does sftp run on?
2) if it is indeed port 21, how to I tell openssh to disable sftp.

sftp uses the ssh port, tcp port 22, so you can run both openssh and an ftp server on the same computer.

You could always comment out teh following line in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

Subsystem sftp /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server

Restart the sshd service and then it won't allow connections

Thanks for your suggestion, here. I was taking a look on how to do the same thing (disable SFTP in RedHat Enterprise Server 3) and I did what you suggested. I also "rpm -e vsftpd" to remove the default FTP client that comes with RHES3. Ideally, there wouldn't be any file-transferring mechanisms of this sort off or onto this box for right now. The problem is, I can still connect via SFTP, even after I restarted the service. I even went so far as to restart the machine, yet I can still connect to this machine via SFTP. Here's what I've got:

#MaxStartups 10
# no default banner path
#Banner /some/path
#VerifyReverseMapping no

# override default of no subsystems
# Subsystem sftp /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server

Any suggestions on what to do next?