Well after a great deal of sifting through posts, I still have not found what I need...

Beginnning with NOOBIE - I am a 15 year veteran of Windows/DOS, but am still quite new to Linux (Fedora Core 6?) and have been able to successfully set up Apache on it to serve my website.

However, I need a way to FTP files up to it from the Internet and locally.

I have downloaded vsftpd and attempted to install... many aspects are still confusing me to no end and the manual is just plain huge.

It appears I have everything going ok, except for a few major problems (hence why it doesn't work and why I'm posting... )

1) in setting up, I attempted to run vsftpd & and received a message that it needed to be run from inetd... I have no clue what this means, and in searching (google, here etc) I found SFA about inetd other than there SHOULD be a file called /etc/inetd.conf OR /etc/xinetd.conf - NEITHER exists... so on to the next attempt,

2) in the vsftpd.conf file, the INSTALL guide tells me to add listen=YES to the file to test it in "standalone" - when I do this, at least the message changes to
500 OOPS: could not bind listening IPv4 socket
So I assumed this may be a firewall issue, but I checked and I have the software firewall completely disabled... now I am using a Linksys WRT54GS router, but have forwarded port 21 to the Linux IP addy directly

3) I can't seem to find anything about setting up user accounts for the FTP server - I don't want ANY anon users, hence I've disabled this function in the .conf file, but can't seem to see where I add a user for the FTP server to allow.

ANY and ALL help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks much!

George
Linux N00B

See if this helps;
http://www.vsftpdrocks.org/rpm/

Have your installed vsftpd through yum, pirut or something else?
If you've used yum or pirut you should be able to start it with:

/sbin/service vsftpd start

Or
system-config-services
It will appear in the list of services if installation went ok.

And as far as i know vsftpd will allow anyone that has a unix account with password, maybe an exception for root.

To be entirely honest, I still am a bit clueless as to what I did...

1) I removed the listen= line from the vsftpd.conf file

2) I created a file called /etc/inetd.conf and put the following line in it:

ftp stream nowait ftp root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/sbin/vsftpd

3) Then, I "ran" the program by using

/etc/init.d/vsftpd start

and it just worked!

I also realized that ANY linux user I created can log in, except root for security.

Incidentally, I believe a lot of this crap could have been averted had this been installed from an RPM or Yum, but I did it from a .tar and did it "manually" I guess.

Thanks for all your help guys!

Now for the next challenge...getting Apache to serve up more than one website domain... yay!