Secure FTP server in Linux

Setting up secure FTP server in Ubuntu 10.10

Initial requirements

If you already running any other FTP services in your network environment, decide which port you want to use with FTP.

Create users for accessing FTP services and change user directories accordingly in /etc/passwd file

Download and install

1. sudo apt-get install vsftpd
2. configure the vsftpd.conf to change the settings. Most of the default settings will work with vsftpd but few changes are mandatory.
3. Edit /etc/vsftpd.conf using nano.
4. By default passive mode is enabled on vsftpd.  If you want to disable passive mode just add pasv-enable=NO
5. Also if you want to change the default port no add or change this line listen_port=21
6. Try to jail FTP users within their directory

Troubleshooting vsFTP errors

1. 1.       vsFTP Login authentication failed

Possible solutions:

1.1   In FTP, client use only FTP service rather than choosing SFTP or different one.

1.2   Select the password which is not more complex. Means if you include complex ASCII characters, FTP server won’t recognize.

1.3   Disable SSL on vsftp. Add this command to vsftpd.conf file ssl_enable=NO

1.4   Makes sure to disable anonymous authentication.

2.       Can’t access the directories. Listing the remote directories ‘/’ failed. Error numbers include 500, 533 or any series in 500.

2.1 change permissions on the directories with Recursive permissions.
E.x          chmod –R 777 folder_name_of_FTP_Access
2.2 set umask value in vsftpd.conf to 002. Umask_value=002
2.3 edit etc/passwd file to change directories for FTP users

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