How to install ProFTPD on CentOS 7.0

This document describes how to install and configure ProFTPD in CentOS 7.0 Server. ProFTPD is an FTP daemon for unix and unix-like operating systems. ProFTPD is developed, released and distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL), which basically establishes it as free software, meaning that it may be sold, licensed and otherwise manipulated in any way desired as long as full and complete source code either accompanies any ProFTPD packages or is made available by any and all sites that distribute pre-compiled binaries. The software can be modified by anyone at anytime, as long as all derived works also are licensed under the GNU Public License.

1 Preliminary Note

This tutorial is based on CentOS 7.0 server, so you should set up a basic CentOS 7.0 server installation before you continue with this tutorial. The system should have a static IP address. I use 192.168.0.100 as my IP address in this tutorial and server1.example.com as the hostname. 

2 Install ProFTPD

2.1 Installation:

For this enable EPEL as follows:

rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-2.noarch.rpm

We will first  install the ProFTPD and OpenSSL as follows:

yum install -y proftpd openssl proftpd-utils

We need to start the services

systemctl start proftpd.service
systemctl enable proftpd.service

Addition in CentOS 7.0 we need to configure Firewall-cmd for ftp service as follows:

firewall-cmd --add-service=ftp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

We can check the ProFTPD version as follows:

proftpd -v

2.2 Creating ProFTPD Users

For this I will create a group ftpgroup and user srijan for ProFTPD. I will restrict the user srijan with home directory as /ftpshare

groupadd ftpgroup

Next I will add the user srijan in ftpgroup:

useradd  -G ftpgroup srijan -s /sbin/nologin -d /ftpshare
passwd srijan

[root@server1 ~]# passwd srijan
Changing password for user srijan.
New password: <--ftppassword
Retype new password: <--ftppassword
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
[root@server1 ~]# 

Next we need to make the directory protected from removing and renaming its content by any user, so we will change the directory permissions as follows:

chmod -R 1777 /ftpshare/

Now we are ready for ProFTPD connection

Now we can do login with the user srijan and password at ftp://192.168.0.100

3 Enabling TLS In ProFTPD

In order to enable TLS in ProFTPD, open /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf before editing the file its better to make the original file backup and then edit the file as shown below:

cp /etc/proftpd.conf /etc/proftpd.conf.bak
nano /etc/proftpd.conf 

Give the entries as shown

[...]
DefaultRoot                     ~ !adm
PassivePorts    6000    6100
[...] 

#<IfDefine TLS>
  TLSEngine                     on
  TLSRequired                   on
  TLSRSACertificateFile         /etc/pki/tls/certs/proftpd.pem
  TLSRSACertificateKeyFile      /etc/pki/tls/certs/proftpd.pem
  TLSCipherSuite                ALL:!ADH:!DES
  TLSOptions                    NoCertRequest
  TLSVerifyClient               off
  TLSRenegotiate                ctrl 3600 data 512000 required off timeout 300
  TLSLog                        /var/log/proftpd/tls.log
#  <IfModule mod_tls_shmcache.c>
#    TLSSessionCache            shm:/file=/var/run/proftpd/sesscache
#  </IfModule>
#</IfDefine>
[...] 

I have added 6000 and 6100 ports for allowing passive mode of ftp, similarily I will allow the passive mode through the CentOS firewalld service as follows:

firewall-cmd --add-port=6000-6100/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

We can check the ports status as follows:

firewall-cmd --list-ports

[root@server1 ~]# firewall-cmd --list-ports
6000-6100/tcp
[root@server1 ~]#

Additionally we need to tell SELINUX to allow the read/write of the files.

setsebool -P allow_ftpd_full_access=1

In order to use TLS, we must create an SSL certificate. I will create it in /etc/pki/tls/certs, we can generate the SSL certificate as follows:

openssl req -x509 -nodes -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout /etc/pki/tls/certs/proftpd.pem -out /etc/pki/tls/certs/proftpd.pem

Give the above values in red as per your choice, I have just given an example.

Now for security purpose I will make the certificates only readable as follows:

chmod  0440 /etc/pki/tls/certs/proftpd.pem

Finally restart the ProFTPD service as follows:

systemctl restart proftpd.service

We can connect to the ProFTPD server with Filezilla software, you must have Filezilla installed at client to connect to the server. Open Filezilla and give the details as follows:

Details will be

Host = 192.168.0.100
Protocol = FTP
User = srijan
Port = can be blank if you have not customized it another port than 21
Password = ftppassword (just created above)

Note: Since we have encryted our connection in above step so we will be using Encryption with Require explicit FTP over TLS

If you have not configured TLS then you can use Use Plain FTP

It will ask for trusting the certificates press OK




It will be connected to the FTP shared directory with TLS connection.

4 Anonymous ftp access in ProFTPD

We can make anonymous ftp account in ProFTPD, just add these entries in ProFTPD configuration file:

nano /etc/proftpd.conf

And add these entries at the last of the file,

[...]
###Anonymous share#####
<Anonymous ~ftp>
  User ftp
  Group ftp

UserAlias anonymous ftp
DirFakeUser       on ftp 
DirFakeGroup on ftp
MaxClients 10

    <Directory *>    
<Limit WRITE>     
DenyAll   
</Limit> 
    </Directory>

</Anonymous>

Now we need to restart the services:

systemctl restart proftpd.service

Now connect it through Filezilla as follows:

Note: Since we have encryted our connection in above step so we will be using Encryption with Require explicit FTP over TLS

If you have not configured TLS then you can use Use Plain FTP

Press Connect:

It will ask for trusting the certificates press OK

We have successfully connected to the server with Anonymous user.

Congratulations! Now we have successfully configured ProFTPD server environment in CentOS 7.0 :)

5 Links

• CentOS : http://www.centos.org/
• ProFTPD : http://www.proftpd.org/