Comments on: Setting up FTPS using vsftpd for WordPress plugins auto upgrade

By: Whoot! Debian server and Wordpress – Completed | My Blogging Life

Whoot! Debian server and Wordpress – Completed | My Blogging Life — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 20:03:27 +0000

[...] Jeannot’s instructions, I was able to use VSFTPD with FTPS. I tried the tutorial from Praveen Kumar’s site, but I was unsuccessful. I did gain the knowledge on how to test if FTPS is working from [...]

By: Nnyan

Nnyan — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:20:07 +0000

Any way someone could create a shell script that can do this in an automated way?

By: Iain

Iain — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:55:13 +0000

Nice post, Praveen. Been stuck on this for a while and was getting nowhere with the WordPress documentation. Looks like I was asking the wrong question.

This helped.

By: Setting up FTP server for wordpress upload @ billyduc

Setting up FTP server for wordpress upload @ billyduc — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 02:41:38 +0000

[...] : http://praveen.kumar.in/2009/05/31/setting-up-ftps-using-vsftpd-for-wordpress-plugins-auto-upgrade/ Script to find a string on list of file and print out that file facebook for user using ISP [...]

By: Colin Brett

Colin Brett — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:54:07 +0000

Praveen,

I had been banging my head off this for a couple of days before I found your post. The critical thing for me was the rsa_private_key_file which was not described in any of the other posts I have seen.

I included this parameter (per your step 2d) and now vsftpd is accepting implicit SSL connections.

May I ask one question, however? Which version of vsftpd are you using? Red Hat supplies 2.0.5 which apparently doesn’t support implicit SSL. This was included in 2.0.7. I used 2.2.1 (released in October 2009) which I compiled from source.

Many thanks for your help.
Colin Brett

By: Waz

Waz — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:18:43 +0000

So now adding a user for ftp purposes(themes, media uploads, updating)? I’ve got webmin at my disposal (local server – Debian Lenny) and I’ve added a user as a member of www-data group, their home directory is /var/www (did not select “create home directory” or “copy template files..” during creating them under webmin). I get this

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.3.zip.

Unpacking the update.

Warning: ftp_mkdir() [function.ftp-mkdir]: Create directory operation failed. in /var/www/wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-ftpext.php on line 240

Could not create directory: /var/www/wp-content/upgrade

Installation Failed

Before I go chown’ing, chmod’ing etc(still hazy on these) I’d love some advice!!! Sorry if this is simple stuff….these are baby steps for me….building the server from scratch has been a big effort!!!

Cheers Everyone:)

By: Wayne Zimmerman

Wayne Zimmerman — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:20:38 +0000

Nice Post, I would mention that you may want to set up a specific user to do those updates with the following commands:

sudo useradd ftpuser -d /var/www
sudo passwd ftpuser

I also then chrooted my server so they can’t escape from that specified home directory.

My only battle beyond that was giving permissions to that ftpuser so it could write to the files it was trying to update during the automatic update process.

By: Jason F

Jason F — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:26:48 +0000

This worked perfectly for me! The only suggestion I’d make is that for step 2d, when you describe the “ssl-cert-snakeoil” files, the user might not know that those are actual/real files on their system (the name makes them sound like placeholder/fakes just used in an example.) I was surprised when I went into my filesystem and saw them in there.

Great tutorial and a real lifesaver. Thanks a ton Praveen!

By: pitsch

pitsch — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:37:20 +0000

looks like a helpful howto. maybe i am missing something, but is it necessary to enable anonymous logins by default?

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:06:57 +0000

Well, I do see the response that users must use encryption, but here’s what happened after that:

530 Non-anonymous sessions must use encryption.
Error: Could not connect to server
Status: Resolving address of (server name removed)
Status: Connecting to x.x.x.x(IP removed):990…
Status: Connection attempt failed with “ECONNREFUSED – Connection refused by server”.
Error: Could not connect to server
Status: Waiting to retry…
Status: Resolving address of (server name removed)
Status: Connecting to x.x.x.x(IP removed):990…
Status: Connection attempt failed with “ECONNREFUSED – Connection refused by server”.
Error: Could not connect to server

This was over ftps with filezilla. I did connect to another server, not owned by me, over ftps with filezilla to test the client out.

When I run netstat -an | grep “LISTEN” I don’t see port 990 listening even though ssl_enable=YES is set in the config file. So I set “listen_port=990″ and it stops listening on port 21 and now I see port 990 when I view netstat. Seems like it’s good at that point.

When I try to connect now, I get this:

Status: Resolving address of (server name removed)
Status: Connecting to x.x.x.x(IP removed):990…
Status: Connection established, initializing TLS…
Error: Connection timed out
Error: Could not connect to server

So it’s like the server can’t establish the connection even though vsftpd and openssh is installed. I’ve ran some commands, forgot what they were, that are supposed to verify if vsftpd is able to do ftps and they came back good. So I’m stumped. All the sites I’ve read state how easy it is to set up and I’ve been working on it for a couple of days now. Maybe it doesn’t like the certificate????? Any other thoughts? Thanks so much for your help.