The company I work for provides file updates to our major client via an FTP system. On our FTP server, active download connections appear to be using vsftpd. However, when I went to look that up online, what I found indicated that the 'executable' for this resides in /etc/init.d - and I'm not finding that on our box. What I have found (literally - used the 'find' command) is the following:

Which, if any, of these is the file that's managing the connections? I know it's using vsftpd because that's the item that shows in the output from a px ax command, and because the log (when I found it) matches what I know the most recent activity was. I just don't know which file I should be looking at. I thought to use the 'status' parameter for these files (see which ones were 'up'), but none of them accepted it the way I expected them to.

The reason I'm looking into this is a recent 'incident' (major upgrade; limited server connections, several client machines each at several offices - took half the day for some people to access the files); my boss has asked me to look into determining whether or not it's possible to set up mirrors of our ftp server's setup on the local servers we maintain at each office. I can certainly set up the same directories and pass things from our server to the local ones. I've verified the presence of vsftpd on a randomly chosen office server. I just don't know how I'll need to set up and configure the local units for FTP. I'd thought if I could map out how it's working on the current FTP server I'd be able to work backwards toward that, but I'm not sure where to begin at this point.

Anyone have any advice on this? Suggestions, or links to a beginner's 'howto' that might help me figure out what I need to do? I would greatly appreciate anything the community can offer.

Likely via xinetd. See: /etc/xinetd.d/vsftpd. Therefore it would not have an init.d script nor respond to a "/foo/bar/vsftpd status" command.

xinetd listens on the FTP port and calls /usr/sbin/vsftpd when a connection is made.

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Thank you very much, AlucardZero. I've run into another problem down the road, but it appears you were completely correct in your assessment and did manage to help me get further with what I am attempting.