Hi,

I have just installed mandrake 10 and am trying to copy files to it via ftp (ws-ftp). However I can't login, it refuses to allow me even though I have the correct root password.

However, I can login as another user fine.

So can anyone tell me how to get this working.
I'm assuming it not allowed or activated at present.

thanks

Sometimes there are default settings so that you can't actually login as root, you instead have to "su" the root id. Or similarly, maybe you can only use root from a console terminal, not remotely. There may be something similar to this that you're experiencing.

You should probably be using sftp anyway and you shouldn't be ftping in as root. You should do it to some other user and then if necessary login as root and copy the files over. This is probably better security anyway, I'm not sure why you would want to ftp in as root.

thanks for the reply.
I want to ftp in as root so that I can copy my web site over.
I understand that maybe you shouldn't login as root over ftp, but from a purely technical point of view I suppose I am curious about what controls ftp access and I just want to understand more about how this process works.

For instance are there files which control who can log in? If so what are they and how do you amend them to allow/disallow access?

I can live with logining in as another user, but I also wanted to understand more about this Linux world I have entered!

Well you kind of have to dig around because they're different for every distribution and every ftp server etc. You might want to try "grep -r "ftp" *" without the outer quotes inside of your /etc directory. This might come up with an ftp config file as well as lot of other junk. It would be easiest to consult the documentation for the distribution and for the ftp software to find out where these things reside. For instance it might be an sshd configuration file that has a line you can comment(#) out that reads NO_ROOT_LOGIN.

OK
- You've been very helpful. I'll go away and dig a bit.
I'll come back if I turn nothing up, but thanks very much for what you've told me.