I just did a basic yum install vsftpd
on a CentOS 5.3 box, I can FTP to the machines IP address from a shell on the box itself, but cannot FTP from any other machine on the same LAN.
$ ftp 1.2.3.4
ftp: connect: Connection refused
Troubleshooting steps already tried:
- on local machine A, attempted to FTP to A's IP with valid credentials, succeeded
- on machine B on same network, attempted to FTP to A's IP, got connection refused as indicated above
- from same machine B, nmap shows port 21 open
- from same machine B, can telnet to port 21 and see the vsftpd banner
- so, seems the daemon is listening, but something about a connection attempt from outside causes it to refuse the connection.
....and while rewriting this question I restarted the vsftpd daemon and it all started working as expected.