The Washington University FTP Daemon: WU-FTPD

The Washington University FTP server, though widely used, is no longer included with Red Hat 9 and up. The name of the Washington University FTP daemon is wu-ftpd; it must be running to allow FTP access by remote users. As with other servers, you can start the FTP server at boot time, through xinetd when a request is received, or directly from the command line. By default, the wu-ftpd server is installed to run using xinetd. The use of xinetd for the servers is described in detail in Chapter 20. The command name for the FTP server invoked by xinetd is in.ftpd. This is a link to the wu-ftpd command. xinetd will run a file called wu-ftpd located in the /etc/xinetd.d directory.

You can use numerous configuration options to tailor your FTP server to your site's particular needs. WU-FTPD makes use of several configuration files located in the system's /etc directory. All begin with the pattern ftp. The primary configuration file is named ftpaccess. Here, you provide basic server information and access for specified directories. The ftphosts, ftpusers, and ftpgroups files control access by systems, particular users, and groups. ftpconversions specifies how archive and compression operations are to be performed on files before or after they are transferred. xferlog is the log file that stores a running log of all transactions performed by the server.