Comments on: Evaluating FTP Servers: ProFTPd vs PureFTPd vs vsftpd

By: Anhad

Anhad — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 19:26:00 +0000

In reply to Lovetide ??. And I wasted 2 hours finding that out :X

By: NM

NM — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:17:00 +0000

great article.. right when I needed it. :)

which one do you think would be the best if I want it integrated with LDAP. Upto 150 Windows active directory users.??

By: mpoplin

mpoplin — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 16:40:00 +0000

thanks, this article helped me out when i needed to add a dedicated ftp service for a client (sftp would not suffice—the customer is always right).

By: John Westerdale

John Westerdale — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:16:00 +0000

Do any allow separate logging for each permitted user? Sounds like ProFTP, but its of great interest when setting up a company Intranet for a few but distinct FTP clients. Some are chatty as heck, and others are once a month.
Thanks for the informative comparison.

By: Dave Drager

Dave Drager — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 04:15:00 +0000

In reply to Harry Kashouli. I'm surprised that it would expose the entire root folder to logged in users. Did you use chroot_local_user=YES?

By: Harry Kashouli

Harry Kashouli — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:43:00 +0000

Hi there,

I am confused by your summary of vsftpd: “If you want to run a FTP server at scale with many users: vsftpd”. If anything, I disagree because I am trying exactly that with it, and hit nothing but issue after issue.

An example: if I want to allow everyone that can log on to the server to use ftp, by default they can navigate to any folder on the machine. If I try to fix this via chroot/jail, vsftpd jails them only within their home folder (which makes zero sense when wanting multiple users to use the same shares). If I try to use local_root, the server refuses to start on three distributions.

I then discovered that I could bind mount the desired share in their folder, but that assumes their folder already exists; I have my server in an AD environment and home folders are created upon first ssh or samba share login, so this solution is impossibly hard.

I will try the other two and see if they can do what I want. I find that vsftp is best only if you want each user to have their own personal share, or if you enjoy exposing your entire root folder to anyone that can log in via ftp.

By: Lovetide ??

Lovetide ?? — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 08:30:00 +0000

it seems CentOS 6.3 contains only vsftpd package, proftpd and pure-ftpd are available from repoforge repository.

By: Dave Drager

Dave Drager — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:23:00 +0000

In reply to Troll.

Howdy! Tell you what – you are right – the CVE title search was down when I wrote this so I used the keyword search to perform the queries. Now that it is back up, I’ve added the product/title search and changed the numbers to reflect those queries. I’ve also performed a similar search on Shodan and listed the number of vulnerabilities for each FTP server.

I’m not saying that any one is more secure than the other, but there needs to be some sort of quantifiable measure to compare them.

Thanks for responding!

By: Troll

Troll — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 09:11:00 +0000

And now do your homework and read those CVEs you assigned to vsftpd. There are kernel bugs, buggy patches applied by RH, bugs in some third party software (as webmin module or pam-mysql). Count only bugs in vsftpd, not all bugs with string “vsftpd” in description.