topic Re: Problem with ProFTPD in Operating System - HP-UX

Problem with ProFTPD

John Huck — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:38:32 GMT

We've just implemented ProFTPD to plug up a glaring security hole. All of our automated processes have worked fine except one, which is a .NET VB application that ftps a file to our HP-UX 11.11 box from a Windows 2002 server. The problem, from the Windows side, is that it gets to a point in the process and then stops receiving responses from ProFTPD. It issues a PASV command, and then expects to receive "227"..., but it is receiving a blank string, which it interprets as an error. The server logs look normal. I see the PASV comming in, and the 227 going out.

Of course, when I run the exact same commands from a command line, they work just fine, and the 227... is returned as it should be.

And of course, the person who wrote the code is long gone, and no one is willing to touch it.

Has anyone experienced similar behavior with ProFTPD on HP-UX. I can't find any references to anything similar on there site.

Thanks for the help!

JH

Re: Problem with ProFTPD

Peter Godron — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 04:04:36 GMT

John,
have you gone through:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1048763
http://www.castaglia.org/proftpd/doc/contrib/ProFTPD-mini-HOWTO-Debugging.html

When you say "I see the PASV comming in, and the 227 going out." - which end can you see this happening at ? WIN/VB/HP

Full docs at: http://www.proftpd.org/

Re: Problem with ProFTPD

John Huck — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 11:56:00 GMT

Thanks for your response. Yes, I had seen both of those threads. I don't think is issue is passive mode, really, which seems to work fine from the command line, but something with the way ProFTPD is returning its result string.

My references to seeing PASV and 227 were to the log files on the hpux server. Here are the relevant entries (Ive removed user id's, etc):

[13/Dec/2006:14:47:11 -0800] "USER xxxxxxxx" 331 -
[13/Dec/2006:14:47:23 -0800] "PASS (hidden)" 230 -
[13/Dec/2006:14:47:33 -0800] "CWD /home/xxxxxx/xxxxxx" 250 -
[13/Dec/2006:14:47:44 -0800] "PASV" 227 -

Then the process dies on the client side. On the client side, the last thing that happens is it sends the "PASV", but never recieves the "227..." repsonse. They seem to get a blank string.

I'm almost positive its a code bug on the client side, but convincing the developers of that is difficult since it worked with the default HP ftp server.