izmaelis' blog

Most of Ubuntu fans and users already know that a new version of this wonderful operating system was released on 29 October 2009. Karmic Koala (a fancy name isn't it?) has lots of new features and improvements, but I will not bother to list them here cause this blog entry is not about that. Just navigate to an official webpage if you want to find out more about Ubuntu 9.10.
I have a long history of using various Ubuntu versions on my private SSH/HTTP/FTP/etc box and wonderful tool do-release-upgrade was already installed. I didn't actualy remember any major problems migrating from older versions of Ubuntu so I typed sudo do-release-upgrade and hit enter. Process of migrating from Jackalope to Koala went as smooth as a breeze although I was upgrading through an SSH session.
Logging in to the system was succesful after issuing a required reboot. I started screen (somehow all tweaks and bits like status line in a bottom of terminal windows were gone), created few virtual windows and ran usual programs such as rtorrent, Midnight Commander, silc, irssi, nano editor etc. Everything just worked...
... for a several days. I received IM from a friend of mine then. He was wondering why my FTP was down. Interesting part was that proftpd config files and default directories were there, but running sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd start|stop|restart failed everytime with no output whatsoever. It seemed like actual software just wasn't installed at all. sudo apt-cache search proftpd showed me that proftpd package is called by a different name - proftpd-basic - now (as opposed to proftpd in Ubuntu 9.04). sudo apt-get install proftpd-basic was next step but proftpd -n showed an error:
Failed binding to 0.0.0.0, port 21: Address already in use
Check the ServerType directive to ensure you are configured correctly.
After googling arround I found that possible solution for this problem can be switching FTP daemon from standalone to inetd mode in configuration file /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf at ServerType directive. I edited corresponding line in a proftpd configuration file mentioned above and restarted server with sudo reboot. This helped bringing FTP service back to life.
I hope these simple tips and tricks will help you too!