Hi, I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction here!

I look after a server which accepts automatic overnight PASV FTP uploads from remote clients. When the uploads are complete, my Bash script copies the files to another location.

The problem is, my script needs to be a bit smarter when it comes to detecting active FTP sessions.

I was using:

to test if there were active sessions, but came unstuck when a local user left an unrelated FTP session active. The result - my script hung around all night thinking there was an active upload from a remote client.

My server is behind a firewall, so remote clients all show an internal (NAT) address, so I can't differentiate by source IP address.

I can't install LSOF or FUSER for security reasons.

Is there a way I can test for active FTP sessions from specific users?

I am running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Tikanga).

Thanks for reading!

DZ

Hi,

Just a thought here but wouldn't using rsync solve your problems?

You could have a cron job that would rsync every hour and keep your copy up to date within an hour?

That way, no need for an elaborate script and rsync would only copy the changes and minimise on bandwidth.

Just a thought.

Thanks eco, but I can't alter anything about the way the remote machines transfer the files. The machines are maintained by a third party and they would want paying for making any changes!

I need to work with what I've got...

DZ

Hi

I've been using Pure-FTPd for a similar task - http://www.pureftpd.org/project/pure-ftpd

It has a feature where you can configure it to run a script on all uploads when the upload is done. That script will get the name of the uploaded file as parameter. So then checking if the upload is in progress is not necessary.

It also has a command "pure-ftpwho" that shows what is happening - with an optional -x parameter to give the information in XML format so it's easily parsed by a script.

Guttorm,

Thanks for that - I'm using vsftpd server and need to work with that.
Pure-FTPd looks good, but I'm stuck with vsftpd.

There must be a way to do this by looking for open files, running processes, netstat results?

Thanks,

DZ

Hmm. Well I don't know much about vsftp. But what about reading its log file? Then do some actions when the files are uploaded...

Yeah, I could do that. The last line logged when a transfer completes is:

I could look for the string "Goodbye" in the last line in the vsftp.log and wait if it isn't found. That doesn't get around the problem of an internal user leaving an FTP session active..

As I said earlier, the Client IP address is always the internal (NAT) address, so I can't differentiate based on that.

Another method I considered was looking for files modified in last n seconds in the ftp area and wait..

I'm convinced there must be a better way of doing this - maybe not!

Thanks for suggestions so far,

DZ

Just a late thought... you could terminate an ftp session after 10 minutes of inactivity.