Proftpd refuses to start - F8

[CD-RW]

[SOLVED] Hi all. I'm still on F8 on this particular machine. Hope to upgrade soon though.

Proftpd has been running OK until recently, when I tried to connect using my laptop.

All I get is the proftpd-socket file under /var/run/proftpd/

I cant' find any log files with error messages in them.

I have checked /var/log/messages - nothing in there either.

I have rebooted the machine after re-installing proftpd. Still it wont start

Is there any way to find out why proftpd has decided not to start any more please?

[giulix]

su -c "proftpd -n"

[CD-RW]

[root@myhost cd-rw]# proftpd -n
- warning: unable to determine IP address of 'myhost'
- error: no valid servers configured
- Fatal: error processing configuration file '/etc/proftpd.conf'

That's looking good giulix.

I seem to remember editing /etc/hosts recently. When I saved the file I got a message about the file having hard links to it. I may have accidently detached those links. Could this be where the problem is?

The thing is, I don't know where the hard links were pointing from, to the hosts file.

Something to do with proftpd maybe?

Normally proftpd works out-of-the-box, with zero configuration from me

[giulix]

Just make sure you've got an entry in /etc/hosts that points to your NIC, as in the following example:

[giulix@itmif185 ~]$ cat /etc/hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn	itmif185.xxxxx.xxxxx.xxxx.com	itmif185	localhost.localdomain	localhost
::1	localhost6.localdomain6	localhost6

where itmif185.xxxxx.xxxxx.xxxx.com is the FQDN of your FTP server and nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn is the IP address of your NIC

[CD-RW]

Originally Posted by giulix

Just make sure you've got an entry in /etc/hosts that points to your NIC, as in the following example:

[giulix@itmif185 ~]$ cat /etc/hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn    itmif185.xxxxx.xxxxx.xxxx.com    itmif185    localhost.localdomain    localhost
::1    localhost6.localdomain6    localhost6

where itmif185.xxxxx.xxxxx.xxxx.com is the FQDN of your FTP server and nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn is the IP address of your NIC

Sorted now thankyou giulix. The reason for proftpd throwing a wobbly and refusing to start was this:

My machine's actual domain name is just a synonym for the FQDN. This is to keep the name in the shell CLI short and sweet.

Recently I was setting-up some domain names for testing some name-based virtual-hosts locally on my machine. (I also noticed the mod-time for /etc/hosts was around the time proftpd last worked.)

So I decided to tidy-up the domain names and just use two different types of domain names.

I went from this:

# NIC IP-Address      Full-Qualified-Hostname  Short-Hostname  Really-Shortname
   nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn     www.myhost.net           myhost.net      myhost

To this:

# NIC  IP-Address     Full-Qualified-Hostname  Short-Hostname
   nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn     www.myhost.net           myhost.net

and the actual hostname for my machine is 'myhost'. So Proftpd must have been looking in /etc/hosts for a hostname called exactly 'myhost', and refused to start when it did not find that exact entry.

So adding the Really-Shortname entry back into /etc/hosts has fixed the problem, and I can now start proftpd again!

Thanks again for the pointer giulix.

BTW, I've never had to put my external static IP address into the /etc/hosts file before. However I do use a static IP address for the machine's NIC, which I configure manually, to match my routers internal gateway address - so my machine's NIC IP and the routers Gateway IP are on the same internal network.