As usual, the list provided a solution almost at once. I think the
best summary is to quote Sean McGlynn verbatim:
> Believe it or not, the EXACT same thing happened here a couple of weeks
> ago on two different servers. I spent two days trying to work out the
> reason why, but I never got to the bottom of the problem. Eventually, I
> got around the problem on one server by restarting inetd (which looks
> after the spawning of ftp sessions) using the commands
> "/sbin/init.d/inetd stop" followed by (you might have guessed :-)
> "/sbin/init.d/inetd start". But for some reason this wouldn't fix things
> on the second server. The only workaround I could find for that server
> was to edit /etc/inetd.conf, comment out the line pointing ftp to the wu
> ftpd daemon, "comment in" the line pointing ftp to the standard Digital
> Unix ftpd daemon (/usr/sbin/ftpd), and then restart inetd as above. This
> did the trick for the "dir" command, but might not be the answer if you
> really need wuftpd (actually, as soon as I'd restarted inetd, I changed
> /etc/inetd.conf back the way it was - I'm hoping that the next time we
> reboot, wuftpd will work again as before!). Anyway, hope this helps in
> some way. Let me know if you want any more info (and particularly if you
> solve the problem properly ;-)
>
> Cheers,
> Sean
> Sean McGlynn (TMIAU)
I followed his suggestion and restarted inetd; this solved the problem
(many thanks, Sean). But I'm still puzzled. It is odd it should happen
to both of us at about the same time: some kind of denial-of-service
attack perhaps?
It occurred to me about 10 seconds too late that it would be
instructive to capture the environment of inetd before killing it. If
you find its PID and type
ps ep PID | less
that will do it.
Regards,
Bob
--
======================================================================
Bob Vickers R.Vickers_at_dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk
Dept of Computer Science, Royal Holloway College, University of London
WWW: http://www.cs.rhbnc.ac.uk/home/bobv
Phone: +44 1784 443691
Received on Tue Dec 08 1998 - 11:29:45 NZDT