ProFTPD on Ubuntu – connection times out
We have set up an Ubuntu machine in our network to have a real LAMP stack. It’s just the best way to have a decent working Drupal installation. While you can off course manage a Drupal site from outside of you LAN, adding modules still requires you to put files into the modules directory (/sites/all/modules) of your Drupal. That means, you need FTP access to those folders.
So we set up ProFTPD. Installing it was no issue, but getting users to be able to connect to the ftp server from outside the network, that was another story all together…
It would take us a long time to go true all our trials and errors, but the key actions we finally did to get it to work are the following:
- Create a new user
- set any username
- chose /bin/sh as shell
- chose “normal password” (for webmin users)
- Edit your proftpd conf file (on ubuntu : /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf)
- set AuthAliasOnly to off
- comment out the UserAlias line
- Make sure your ftp client (CuteFTP in our case) uses “auto” as data mode. I had it set to PASV first and that did not work.
After completing these steps you should be able to connect to your FTP server. If it still does not work, you should have a look at your firewall. Make sure that port 21 has been opened. If you want to use FTP over SSH2, you should open port 22.