FTP Breaking on FEAT (vsftpd on Fedora Core 8)

It’s been a while since I connected to my Amazon EC2 running Fedora Core 8 via FTP and for no reason I tried connecting there today and badaboom! Strange though, it worked fine about a month ago, I was able to upload and download files, but this time I got a little crash. On one version of FileZilla FTP client I received a simple “Unable to connect” error. On a newer version I noticed that the FEAT (features list, or whatever) command was breaking the connection so I googled that.

People say that the server is broken but they don’t mention any tips on how to fix that. I logged on via SSH, rebooted the vsftpd daemon, with no luck. Then I tried connecting to localhost via FTP (in SSH) using the ftp command. I got a connection, LS and CWD commands worked just fine and I was able to see the files. So I sent a FEAT command and got an “invalid command” error. Humm?

Somebody on the Ubuntu forums mentioned that it’s an encodings issue. Client unable to handle UTF8 though server runs only UTF8. Does that make any sense? Guess not. Well before you go digging into your encoding settings and messing up your configuration files, or shutting down the server and starting a new instance (I’m on Amazon EC2) you might wanna try this fix.

I have no idea how it got there, but in my /etc/vsftpd.conf I found a new strange line saying:

connect_from_port_20=YES

For one second there I thought that it’s fair enough. But hey, wasn’t FTP supposed to work on port 21? Right. Comment out that line, restart your vsftpd daemon (service vsftpd restart) and voila! Worked for me.

I still think it’s strange though.. Ghosts? ;)