2007-04-15 #1

Things abuout iptables and vsftp

There are a couple things about tickets I worked on today I wanted to remember.

iptables

Not everyone knows (like me) that iptables has some configuration details in /etc/sysconfig/iptables-config on Red Hat based distros. Like for instance nothing you save with /sbin/iptables-save will be saved unless you edit this file.

vsftp

Sometimes people really do want an anonymous ftp server. It's just understood, that files are uploaded in /var/ftp/pub by default, but this might not be clear to a newbie. This is the anon_root default setting, which doesn't appear in vsftpd.conf. I always like to change to /home/ftp or something.

The gotcha is that the pub folder is not writable. Thats where chmod a+w /var/ftp/pub comes in handy. Of course it's not a good idea to run an anonymous ftp server, usually this is a temporary situation to allow someone to upload some files.

Here is a page I found with some good tips about anonymous logins on vsftp http://www.phptr.com/articles/article.asp?p=378136&seqNum=7&rl=1