Although I didn't receive any advice on building or configuring proftpd,
I did receive suggestions for solving the problem of a banner message.
James Sainsbury suggested using the banner feature of tcpwrappers.
Graham Allen suggested using ncftpd.
Noah S. suggested using vsftpd.
John Lanier pointed out that his Tru64 5.1B ftpd has a banner option.
This morning I installed vsftpd and the problem is resolved.
Elizabeth Harvey-Forsythe
MIT Media Lab
Original question:
> I have a 4.0F machine that is slated for retirement but needs to run
> an ftp service for at least a few more weeks or months. I wanted to
> add a welcome message or banner that indicated the machine would be
> retired, and I seem to recall that the Tru64 ftp daemon is not
> configurable to do that. If I am wrong about that, I'd appreciate it
> if anyone could tell me how to add a message and/or banner.
>
> Proftpd has the configurable banner, and having installed it before
> on a Solaris box without any trouble whatsoever, I thought it would
> be a good choice, but I just can't get it to work. Not in standalone
> mode or inetd mode. Either way, I get this error:
>
> 500 Sorry, no server available to handle request on localhost
>
> The daemon runs, or is launched by inetd, but for some reason it
> cannot spawn new processes. It's set up to run as nobody:nobody,
> although on a lark I also tried root. I also tried using a port over
> 1024, and I used netstat to see if something is in the way. Starting
> it as a daemon with debugging turned on yielded no information of
> discernable value towards resolving this problem.
>
> So my question, of course, is what am I missing?
>
> Elizabeth Harvey-Forsythe
> MIT Media Lab
Received on Wed Mar 31 2004 - 18:26:14 NZST