Hello:

I finally figured out why I couldn't log in locally. When I looked in NEAT at the host tab I saw where I had the localhost.localdomain file all messed up. After I fixed that it disappeared. I can only assume this is what was supposed to happen because after that I was able to log into vsFTPd locally every time. My problem now is logging into it from a different computer on the network. I have a Windows XP computer that I use to login to my laptop. I'm using Filezilla to ftp into my laptop, using port 20. I'm able to connect to the laptop but it never sends the welcome message and eventually times out. I have a local network setup, using the 192.168.0.0/24 range. My Windows XP computer is 192.168.0.1 and my laptop is 192.168.0.2. I can connect to it by I.P. and host name but if I don't receive the Welcome message it just sits there and dies. Does anyone know what's going on here?

Check your /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny files. Comments in the files or a man page can tell you how to format entries in them, but if your local network (or at least your XP machine) isn't allowed to access your laptop, it will time out.

Also check the configuration for vsFTPd--make sure connections are allowed from hosts on your LAN.

Thanks for the info but could you give me a little more information concerning the vsFTPd connections? I went into the config yesterday but I didn't see anything that would allow me to choose what hosts have permission to contact my LAN.

I tried to find some examples of how to enter an I.P. range for my LAN but there's not much out there. Could someone please tell me the correct syntax for entering the following range for FTP access:

192.168.0.0/24

If it requires me to know my Windows XP fully qualified name then please tell me how to find it because I changed my Windows Computer name to Fake several months ago and I can't find anything that looks like fake.localhost.com. Someone please help me.

I'm not familiar with vsFTPd, but I just took a look at the man page for its config file, and it doesn't look like you can limit which IPs can connect to your server, but you can specify which interface to listen on: specify the ip of the desired interface for the listen_address (or listen_address6 if using IPv6) option.

Where are you trying to enter this range?

You shouldn't have to know that name, but if you did, it would just be Fake (not fake.localhost.com).