Important Omission in FTP Configuration Documentation

[Manolis Kiagias]

Richard Raseley wrote:
> Documentation Project Owner,
>
>  
>
> Recently I started my first foray into the world of FreeBSD, thus far I have
> been pleasantly surprised, but I have also found a document on your site
> that has an important omission.
>
>  
>
> In this document:
>
>  
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-ftp.html
>
>  
>
> In section 30.8.2 "Configuration" you list the steps that are required to
> get ftpd up and running, however you fail to mention that you also have to
> add "ftpd_enable="YES" to your "/etc/rc.conf" file and reboot the server. 
>
>  
>
> Ftpd will not work until you complete this step and it took me hours (being
> a n00b) of additional research to figure this out. It would be very helpful
> if you included this in your documentation so that others like myself can
> find it easily.
>
>  
>
> Thank you for your continued work, so far (coming from a Windows world) I am
> very impressed.
>
>  
>
> Best Regards,
>
>  
>
> Richard
>
>   
First of all, thanks for helping us improve our documentation!
The problem with your setup is that you probably missed enabling the
inetd server. This is not mentioned explicitly in the section you were
reading, but it is mentioned in section 30.2.2. If you add
inetd_enable="YES"
to your /etc/rc.conf and reboot, and having followed the rest of the
instructions, your ftp server will be started (when needed) by inetd. To
make things clear, I have added a reference to section 30.2.2 in section
30.8.2

By adding ftpd_enable="YES", the ftp server is started in stand-alone
mode. The inetd setting is not required in this case. I have also added
a few lines on this alternate way of starting ftpd.

These changes will appear on the website in the next 24 hours.

Thanks for submitting this!
manolis@