I upgraded to Ubuntu today and can't get the FTP server to work. ftp://loopback doesn't work so I can't get at my backup files and restore them :-(

I installed proftpd

sudo apt-get install proftpd

I selected it to start with inetd, I wasn't sure what that was and when I type sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd restart

it says
ProFTPd is started from inetd.

What is inetd and hoe do I fix it??

Please help!!!

First, the inetd question:

A server - in this case your FTP server - waits for connections from the outside world. Once connected, it does what it has to do, then the connection connection is closed again. This connection arrives at a specific port (e.g. 80 for web servers, 21 for ftp servers, etc.)

Someone has to check this port for incoming "calls". There are two ways to do that:

1) The (ftp) server can do it by itself (the so called daemon mode).
In order to do that, the server must be active and in memory all the time. If you have a lot of servers running, it can get crowded in your computer's memory.

If you do the init.d start/stop thing, you actually start the program, it stays in memory, waiting for customers... :-) or it gets terminated and removed, resp.

2) You let the super server inetd wake you, if someone calls.

In this case, inetd is watching the port. This setup saves you memory and CPU cycles, but might be a bit slower.


You can't have it both ways.


Now to the ftp server itself:

An ftp server without a configuration file will do nothing. There are a lot of things to configure, before it becomes useful. E.g. which directories to serve, you have to set-up the users for the ftp server, their permissions (what they are allowed to download/upload) etc.

I'm afraid, this is a lot of work. And if you only want to get some files of a computer, there might be faster ways to do that.

Welcome to Linuxquestions.org,

Speaking From personal experience, having used proftpd, wading thru docs, manpages, and forums; I would suggest first to either reinstall proftpd in standalone mode bypassing inetd altogether, or to try pure-ftpd instead. Inetd is a TCP/IP wrapper that listens on designated ports for incoming service requests. When it receives one it spawns the appropriate process, be it ftp http mail or other. Inetd just slows things down if you're not running a production server that may need to re-allocate the system's resources after the process is finished. But seriously, I've used proftpd, wu-ftpd, vsftpd, and pure-ftpd, and IMHO pure-ftpd is the easiest to configure. Granted the documentation is kinda sparse, but I've made ftp servers on Redhat, Fedora (redundant?), SuSE, and FreeBSD and pure-ftpd was the easiest (for myself) on all of them.

OK :-) I got pure-ftpd by apt-getting it :-) now I am in /etc/ftpusers


and it looks like this
--
# /etc/ftpusers: list of users disallowed FTP access.
root
daemon
bin
sys
sync
games
man
lp
mail
news
uucp
proxy
majordom
postgres
www-data
backup
msql
operator
list
irc
nobody
--
Now I am assuming I need to remove someone from the list to get it working :-)

Looks like something got left behind when I apt-get removed the old one

gcarlile@blackone:~$ sudo pure-ftpd -b
Password:
Unable to start a standalone server: Address already in use
gcarlile@blackone:~$

I think a reinstall is called for and try everything again!