FTP Sessions not getting closed:HP-UX

[ssheri]

Hi,

I have an HP-UX Server running with HP-UX 11.11. There are number of FTP sessions happening to this server for daily data transfer. Recently the number of file transfer has been increased because of business need. Now I could find that the a few of the ftp sessions are not getting closed though the file transfer is suceess. This happens approximately for 150 connections out of 1000. This accumulates and finally Server denies any incoming ftp connections.

Please help me by sharing your thoughts and recommendations to fix this issue.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Add the '-t ' value to the 'ftp' entry in '/etc/inetd.conf'.

By default, the 'ftpd' daemon terminates an inactive session afer 15-minutes. The units of the timeout value are in *seconds*.

Once you have modified '/etc/inetd.conf' restart the 'inetd' daemon to re-read the modified configuration file:

# /usr/sbin/inetd -c

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bill Hassell]

> ftp sessions are not getting closed...

Sounds like the client is defective. I am assuming that your HP-UX server is the ftp server and some other unknown box is the client. Therefore the client is not properly closing the sessions. Look for patches or find a better client.

[Tor-Arne Nostdal]

Sounds as you have some kind of application/script that do not exit after completing the file transfer.

Client side:
First of all this is an application error, and the application should do a clean exit (client side).

Server side:
If the FTP server is a HP-UX machine (managed by you) that receive all those files, you could follow JRF's recommendation - to automatically disconnect idle sessions.
Otherwise you could request the administrator of the server, to set a timeout value.
In case your 1000 connections have to be simultaneously, you would need to raise the allowed number of connections on the server.

Client side:
You could introduce some kind of locking mechanism in your application/script to reduce the number of simultaneous connections.

Finally if no other option, you could introduce a script to search for these inactive sessions/processes and give them a kill signal...

/Tor-Arne