I am having some problems setting up FTP on my linux server. DHCP is enabled and our router sees the computer and everything. It can browse the net with no problem as well.

Since our server will be accessable to the outside and therefore a bit more vulnerable, we don't want our other computers on the network to be accessable to anything. So, we're setting it up so that the only way to access it from *any* computer is through FTP. A bit safer that way.

Anyway, we're running into problems actually getting a computer to connect to the server. The connection just times out when we connect to the IP address. Now, I don't know where to go about looking to setup FTP on the server, so that's part of the problem. If anyone could give me some instructions on how to do this, that would be great. Or, direct me to a well written manual for the "new-to-linux" type of person.

Thanks so much for the help!

Well can you even ping the server? Where does the server reside on the network?

Yes, I can ping the server. It responds back.

It's just whenever I try and connect it gives me "A connection with the server could not be established"

I also don't know how to verify that FTP is enabled on linux, considering I've never really used it in depth before.

You can see if ftp is listening for requests by doing:

netstat -l

Thats a lowercase L. If you didn't tell Linux to run ftp then it won't be on.

Alright, so here's the 6 million dollar question. How do I tell Linux to run it?

hehe. Please make the check payable to me. The answer is it depends on what ftp package you are using. I think wu-ftpd comes standard with RedHat8.0 but I use vstfpd. See if you have the packages installed by doing:

rpm -qa | grep wuftpd
rpm -qa | grep vsftpd

Ummmm....if the packages are installed you should be able to do:

/etc/init.d/wuftpd start
or
/etc/init.d/vsftpd start

Then run the 'netstat -l' command again to see if ftp is listening.

Heh. Let me reiterate how linux dumb I am If you just bare with me...

Alright...It looks like vsfptd is what I have...but um...it tells me that there is "No such file or directory" when i type etc/init.d/vsftpd start into the command line.

now if I go into the init.d directory and try it, it tells me that it "cannot open specified config file". Probably because there's nothing called vsftpd in there. Any other ideas?

Well that is odd that you have vsftpd installed but do not have the startup script. Just download the vsftpd packages from here and install by doing:

rpm -Uvh vsftpd*