Setting up Linux FTP

Question

I have a Linux webserver (CentOS) and I wish to set up FTP access to the server. According to the IP table port 21 is open and connections to it are accepted but I'm not sure what to do now.

How do I go about setting up FTP users and enabling in on the Linux install?

Answer 1

I think that out of the box CentOS has vsftpd installed. You can check this with

rpm -qa | grep ftpd
vsftpd-2.2.2-6.el6_0.1.x86_64

If it's not installed you can install it with

yum install vsftpd

Once installed you can start and stop it with the service command

service vsftpd start 
Starting vsftpd for vsftpd:                              [  OK  ]

or

service vsftpd stop
Shutting down vsftpd:                                     [  OK  ]

That's the basics, the rest involves reading the vsftpd and vsftpd.conf man pages.

Answer 2

Here's the RHEL6 documentation for how to set up an FTP server using vsftp. This assumes you're using CentOS6. If not, there should be a corresponding piece of documentation for the specific release of RHEL/CentOS:

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Deployment_Guide/s1-FTP.html