For some weird reason I'm having problems getting the spawn() function working in the hosts.allow file for vsftpd. The following code:

vsftpd: ALL: \
spawn (echo LAN access to %d, Source ip=%a, Sydney time `date` \
| /bin/mail -s "LAN access to %d" root@localhost) &

hangs any connecting ftp client. The email *does* get sent to root, but the ftp client session is hung and needs to be aborted. Identical code works fine for other daemons that I've tried.

In fact, the only thing that seems to work with vsftpd is the setenv() function. All I need to do is flag root with an email when someone tries to connect to vsftpd.

I can demonstrate this behavior on Fedora Core 3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.

Any ideas anyone? Or is this a known bug with tcp_wrappers/vsftpd? Of course tcp_wrappers is enabled in the vsftpd.conf file.

I've given up. There is some serious weirdness in tcp_wrappers support inside vsftpd that I don't understand.

I've disabled tcp_wrappers support, and I'm no longer running vsftpd in stand-alone mode, instead I'm running vsftpd UNDER xinetd and the above hosts.allow file syntax work great.