FTP problems

[JOHN TURNER_2]

We have three servers called athos, aramis and porthos. when we try and ftp to these servers from any other server we get the error message

421 Service not available, remote server has closed connection

however if we FTP out of these machines it will let us do it provided it's not to any of the three machines listed above.

can anyone shed any light on this subject
john

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I suspect that the ftp daemon is not running. That would in no way impact the same box's ability to launch the ftp client.

Examine /etc/inetd.conf and see if the ftp entry is enabled. If it has been commented out, then uncomment the line and issuer an "inetd -c" to force a reread of the file by the inetd daemon.

[Brian Bergstrand]

Are you sure ftpd is configured in /etc/inetd.conf and the ftp ports are listed in /etc/services (or your NIS master)?

Is there an open socket listenting for FTP connections on the servers in question?

netstat -a | grep ftp | grep LISTEN

HTH.

[Steven E. Protter]

The only other possibility to Clay's answer(which I think is right) is that the /etc/services file is messed up or a firewall has port 21 blocked.

You might want to enable enhanced logging in /etc/inetd.conf inetd -c and watch the log files while testing.

tail -f /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

then attempt the ftp command. The error message will help you a lot. If there is no message, then the connection is being blocked between the machines.

SEP

[Steven Gillard_2]

Also check the /var/adm/inetd.sec file on the three servers - you could be restricting access to certain IPs in there.

From the error it sounds like the connection is being accepted (indicating that inetd is listening) but torn down straight away.

Regards,
Steve