Filezilla Server for Linux - Questions

[mtech61]

Hi Tim

Is it a huge job to port the Windows Version of Filezilla Server to Ubuntu or similar?

Is it a Financial issue or a Lack of time resources issue?

If it's Financial I would gladly try and get some financial support/Sponsorship for the developement and judgeing by
the interest others would probably gladly contribute as well. I would rather support donationware/Open Source than make the Fat cats
richer.

if it's a time Issue I can't do much there because I'm a newbie but I love Filezilla Server and would love to
try it on Ubuntu or one of the Linux distro's. It seems there is a lot of interest in a linux based Filezilla server?

Forgive me if it's been asked before

Regards

Dan

[botg]

It's a time issue. In order to port the server, a complete rewrite is necessary.

To prepare for this and to avoid duplicating code, I've already moving code from FileZilla into libfilezilla, which can then be used by both FileZilla and the rewritten FileZilla Server.


That said, you can already run FileZilla Server under Linux through Wine.

[mevenson]

except - no matter what I do - this is what I get when I try to take the server online with the lightning bolt in the FileZilla Server Interface.

Creating listen socket on port 21...
Failed to bind the listen socket on port 21 to the following IPs: 10.0.0.203
Failed to create a listen socket on any of the specified ports. Server is not online!

10.0.0.203 is the IP address of the Ubuntu machine running wine running FileZilla FTP Server.

also this is the message I get on the server interface screen when I start the FTP Server Interface:

FileZilla Server 0.9.60 beta
Copyright 2001-2016 by Tim Kosse (tim.kosse@filezilla-project.org)
https://filezilla-project.org/
Connecting to server localhost:14147...
Connected, waiting for authentication
Logged on
Warning: FTP over TLS is not enabled, users cannot securely log in.

I am running Ubuntu 18.04.2

There are no other applications using any of the ports that FileZilla server wants to use - I've checked. The ubuntu firewall is disabled (allow everything through). Please no preaching about this from the firewall police. I will close it up once I get this working. I installed wine as a regular user. I installed FileZilla as a regular user.

[boco]

IIRC, running under WinE as regular user means you cannot use the privileged ports at all. Please try using a port above 1023.

[mevenson]

It would appear that you actually do remember correctly. Boy - that sucks - can anything be done to allow wine access to port 21? Changed it to another port and it does actually work. Why on earth would wine be limited to which ports it can access. That seems to be a bit of an arbitrary rule to apply. Was someone in the design group just trying to see how annoying they could be?

[boco]

I'm not a Linux guru. My statement actually applies to the *NIX environment as a whole. Privileged ports (up to 1023) can only be used by privileged processes. Privileged ports are also known as "low numbered ports", "system ports" or "well-known ports".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_T ... nown_ports

Here's a quote from the Wikipedia article:

The port numbers in the range from 0 to 1023 (0 to 2^10 − 1) are the well-known ports or system ports. They are used by system processes that provide widely used types of network services. On Unix-like operating systems, a process must execute with superuser privileges to be able to bind a network socket to an IP address using one of the well-known ports.

Another quote from a Linux manual:

Port numbers below 1024 (so-called "low numbered" ports) can only be bound to by root. This is so clients connecting to low numbered ports can trust that the service running on the port is the standard implementation, and not a rogue service run by a user of the machine. Well-known port numbers specified by the IANA are normally located in this root-only space.

So, Linux actually forbids you to run anything other than the native, default system FTP implementation on the privileged port 21. When the FZ Server is natively coming to Linux, I'm sure @botg will take care of that.

You could at least use a port number that's good to remember, like 2100 or 2121...

[botg]

It should be possible to set the CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE capability to make it work with wine. Not sure what the commands are to set this, I'd have to use an internet search engine.