I have success at last
I can ftp from the machine itself and from another computer inside home on the same network. The actual test whether I can access it from outside, will be done tomorrow. But I am hopeful that I shall succeed. (Update : Now I can access it from outside; see my next post below).
Thanks Frodon and everybody else in this forum. I am a longtime reader of this great howto thread and this my first post. For my research collaboration I made a plan to run a ftp server on my home laptop. Since I using a cable modem(Motorola SBG 900E), I am behind the firewall of the router. I faced all kind of problems similar to Steve_250 of this thread. Initially I had 530 error related to password, I had error 500 for invalid port etc etc. I would like to share how I did overcome all of these problems.
1. I followed Frodon's how-to in toto. I didn't use gproftpd. I just copied and pasted his proftpd.conf with few exceptions, e.g. I put AuthAliasOnly to ``off''. Since I am behind a firewall of the router and my ISP provided me with dynamic IP address, I had to install ddclient first and registered my computer at dyndns.com. Then I had to add two lines related to MasqueradeAddress and PassivePorts, as Frodon mentioned, at the end of the file. Finally, I attached two lines as jinc1 suggested. I attached the copy of my proftpd.conf.
2. Next I added the users from the command line but their passwords were added NOT from the command line but from the tool Ubuntu provided : Kmenu --> System --> User Groups(I'm running Kubuntu. Under Gnome I think it's under System). This is fairly easy to do. I checked that everything is consistent with other commands that Frodon's guide provided, e.g. no users get a shell(/bin/false). If I issue the passwd of the users from command line, somehow all the time I got 530 error.
3. Next thing was to configure my router. First, I made sure that my ISP do not block the ports 1980 and the ports 60000-65535. The former is used by proftpd and the latter are the passive ports. Now the firewall and port forwarding config. of my router looks like this :
Firewall
--------
Port ID : proftpd
Enable : yes(tick)
Allowed Protocol : TCP
Allowed Range : 1980:1980
Allow Inbound : Yes
Allow Outbound : Yes
Protocol # : 0
Similarly I defined another Port ID : proftpd-passive. For this, the allowed range is 60000:65535 and all other parameters remaining exactly the same.
The names of the Port ID can be anything.
Port Forwarding
-----------------
Name : proftpd
Port Start : 1980
Port End : 1980
LAN IP Address : 192.168.0.10
Enable : yes
Similarly, I define another port called profptd-passive for which Port Start =60000 and Port End = 65535, and all other parameters remaining the same.
Here 192.168.0.10 is the internal LAN IP address assigned to my laptop by the router dynamically(using DHCP). Since my laptop remains on all the time I didn't go for a static address, though I recommend others to do so.
That's it. If I don't forward all the ports including the passive one I shall get error 500 or the infinite time loop which Steve_250 experienced. I can access it from a Windows machine within the same network, using WS_FTP.
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