Hi, I have a question about allowing anonymous ftp login into vsftp server. I have two linux boxes at home, one is Suse 8.0 Pro and one is Redhat 7.3 (I downloaded the ISO from ftp.redhat.com). I tried to set up the vsftp server on red hat. I believed that I read the man and doc very carefully. I only want to set up a ftp server only allow anonymous user to login, upload or download some files. The configure file looks simple. On red hat, I use xinet to start the vsftp. After I modify the configure file and restart xinet, I can't login as anonymous user. It is always return as "login incorrect". I check the vsftp.conf file again, YES,
the anonymous_enable=YES. Then I copied this file to my suse box, which uses inetd to start vsftp. The strange thing is that I can login vsftp use anonymous account on my suse box. How can this happened? OK, let me make sure what is different between these two boxes:
1) OS: Suse 8.0 Pro vs Redhat 7.3
2) start sevice: inetd vs xinetd
3) The vsftpd.conf file are ABSOLETLY the same. Here it is:
anonymous_enable=YES
dirmessage_enable=YES
xferlog_enable=YES
connect_from_port_20=YES
All other parts in the configure file are comment out.
4)On red hat, there two more files under /etc
one is vsftpd.ftpusers with the follwoing user names in it:
root bin daemon adm lp sync shutdown halt mail news uucp operator games nobody
The other file is vsftpd.user_list with following user names in it:
root bin daemon adm lp sync shutdown halt mail news uucp operator games nobody
but even I deleted these two files and restart xinetd, I still can't login vsftp using anonymous account. If I tried another account, it always say this is for anonymous only.

The last thing is that I type some random password for the anonymous account for login. I don't think that will make any difference, because anonymous account's password is just ignored. I don't have any deny_email_enable or banned_email_file setting in the vsftp.conf file.

By the way, I don't have any hosts.allow or hosts.deny problem on this redhat box. If I change the local_enable=YES in the vsftp.conf file, I can login the vsftp as a local account. But the anonymous account is staill rejected by "login incorrect". The vsftp version on both machines are the same: 1.0.1

I don't know why the same vsftpd.conf will get two different result on Suse and Red hat. I want to make anonymous login on vsftp on my redhat box, but I can't figure out why it failed during login. Any hints?


Thanks

check your passwd file on the red hat box, there must be a user 'ftp' listed for anonftp to work.