FTP port (21) not accessible [SOLVED]

[GodfatherB]

Hello all,

I have a problem with port 21 (FTP). I just can't get it open. In the Firewall settings it shows as "on", but when I run a port scanner it states it is closed. Then I switch it off and try again... closed again. I turn it on again and try again... still closed. I called my ISP if by any chance they are keeping this port closed, but they told me since I have a static IP address all the ports are open.

FTP service is turned on (but anonymous access is not enabled). I don't know how else to check this or how to turn it on. I am not even sure if FTP is running properly, because I was yet unable to connect to FTP (I tried to make a connection to network location... ftp://b3.domain-name.com or ftp://b3.local).

Any suggestions on how should I go about?

[Gordon]

Can you ssh into the B3 and state the result of the following command?

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netstat -an | grep ":21"

Chances are that the service is only exposing itself on IPV6

[GodfatherB]

This is the result...

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tcp        0      0 84.255.231.53:52747     213.107.90.241:21161    ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 84.255.231.53:46982     220.245.53.224:21197    ESTABLISHED

I don't know how to interpret this so I will be most grateful for a crash course explanation...

[pcrene]

I did the same but saw only

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rene@SERVER9:~$ netstat -an | grep :21
         tcp6       0      0 :::21                   :::*                    LISTEN

And i can connect with ftp with no problems.

Rene

[Eek]

It means ftp is not running
try

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/etc/init.d/proftpd start

[GodfatherB]

Tried this, and got the following result...

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Starting ftp server: proftpd - warning: unable to determine IP address of 'B3'
 - error: no valid servers configured
 - Fatal: error processing configuration file '/etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf'
 failed!

As I said... under services FTP is turned on and Firewall is set to open port 21.

[Gordon]

Strange...

Actually what Rene is seeing would be more what I expected. The fix might be the same though and involves editing the config file /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf. Somewhere at the top, probably lines 9 and 10 (difference might apply because of B3 software version) it sais:

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# Set off to disable IPv6 support which is annoying on IPv4 only boxes.
UseIPv6                         on

Do what the comment line hints and change that setting to 'off'.

[Nrde]

As I said... under services FTP is turned on and Firewall is set to open port 21.

from another thread:

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    echo "UseIPv6 off" >> /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf

Also is your hostname correctly defined? i.e., run "hostname" on the commandline.

[GodfatherB]

I changed the "UseIPv6" to off but still get the same message

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Starting ftp server: proftpd - warning: unable to determine IP address of 'B3'
- error: no valid servers configured
- Fatal: error processing configuration file '/etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf'
failed!

And I don't think IPv6 should be the problem... all of my equipment is IPv6 compliant and also my ISP is already on IPv6 as well (as far as I know).

When I run the "hostname" I get out... "B3" (which is the name of my unit).

Any other ideas, things that I could try?

[Eek]

It looks to be the same problem as:
http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?f ... ftp#p16799

can you do a

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cat /etc/hosts

[GodfatherB]

Yes, there was a line missing in the /etc/hosts. I added the B3.localdomain like it said in the other post (http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?f ... ftp#p16799), now it works just fine.

It's funny though, I remember going through those posts when I tried to solve the problem on my own, but apparently I skipped a few important ones. And I saw it as a port problem, not ftp server problem.

Thank you all for your help.