Achmad Z's Archives

Background:

• Buying VPS with CentOS 5.3 as its OS and Kloxo as its VPS control panel
• Need to have Wordpress blog on my website
• Wordpress -- most of the time -- need ftp account to seamlessly install plugins downloaded from Wordpress.org server

Pure-ftpd on my CentOS VPS simply doesn't work, when I check syslog messages

tail -n 200 /var/log/messages | grep ftp

I got some errors for pure-ftpd:

pure-ftpd: (?@?) [ERROR] Unable to switch capabilities : Operation not permitted

That was problem with lib capabilities (libcap.so). When googling out.. I got several possible resolution on this error :
here, here and here
Which the solution was to alter the OpenVZ or recompile pure-ftpd and not use the one from CentOS build.
Since I didn't own the VM (obviously, I'm just a customer), so, my only choice is to recompile pure-ftpd using the correct parameters. Here are the steps:

• remove the standard pure-fptd

yum remove pure-ftpd

• download latest pure-ftpd release from here: http://download.pureftpd.org/pub/pure-ftpd/releases/
• extract the package
• enter the directory
• configure it:

./configure --with-everything --with-paranoidmsg --without-capabilities --with-virtualchroot

• And compile it:

make && make install && make clean

Now we have correct pure-ftpd binary on /usr/local/sbin, next task is editing pure-ftpd xinetd config to adapt the new version and location

• enter /etc/xinetd.d/ directory
• edit pureftp file, change the content from:

service ftp                                                                    
{                                                                              
        disable = no
                socket_type     = stream                                       
                wait            = no                                           
                user            = root                                         
                server          = /usr/sbin/pure-ftpd                    
                server_args     = -A -c5000 -C8 -D -fftp  -H -I15 -lpuredb:/etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb -lunix -L2000:8 -m4 -s -p30000:50000 -U133:022 -u100 -E -Oclf:/var/log/kloxo/pureftpd.log -g/var/run/pure-ftpd.pid -k99 -Z -Y 1
                groups          = yes                                          
                flags           = REUSE                                        
}

into:

service ftp                                                                    
{                                                                              
        disable = no
                socket_type     = stream                                       
                wait            = no                                           
                user            = root                                         
                server          = /usr/local/sbin/pure-ftpd                    
                server_args     = -A -c5000 -C8 -D -fftp  -H -I15 -lpuredb:/etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb -lunix -L2000:8 -m4 -s -p30000:50000 -U133:022 -u100 -E -Oclf:/var/log/kloxo/pureftpd.log -g/var/run/pure-ftpd.pid -k99 -Z
                groups          = yes                                          
                flags           = REUSE                                        
}

• notice that I change server variable and remove "-Y 1" parameters on server_args variable
• restart xinetd

service xinetd restart

• test it

[root@vps ~]# ftp localhost
Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1).
220---------- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [privsep] ----------
220-You are user number 1 of 5000 allowed.
220-Local time is now 08:08. Server port: 21.
220-This is a private system - No anonymous login
220-IPv6 connections are also welcome on this server.
220 You will be disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity.
Name (localhost:root):

Congrats, now we have working pure-ftpd server on CentOS 5.3 VPS