NAME

ftp-proxy - application level proxy for the FTP protocol

SYNOPSIS

ftp-proxy [-c] [-d|-i] [-f file] [-n] [-v level] [-V]

DESCRIPTION

FTP-Proxy acts as an application level gateway between FTP clients and servers. Its main purpose is to secure local FTP servers against possibly insecure clients or malicious attacks. FTP-Proxy is believed to be immune against current known attacks based on the FTP protocol.

FTP-Proxy can be started from the inetd (or xinetd, or any other) internet super daemon or executed on its own as a standalone daemon, in which case it will fork child processes to handle connections. The behaviour depends on the ftp-proxy.conf(5) configuration option ServerType or the -i and -d command line switches, where the latter two take precedence.

FTP-Proxy features a rich set of auditing and command restriction capabilities and is specifically suited for deployment in firewall environments.

OPTIONS

-V

Print the program's version information and terminate with exit code 0.

-c

Read the configuration file, output its contents sorted by section and option name to standard output, and terminate with exit code 0. This option is mostly interesting for diagnostic purposes.

-d

Force FTP-Proxy to run in standalone (daemon) mode, even if a ServerType inetd directive exists in the configuration file.

-i

Force FTP-Proxy to run in inetd mode, even if a ServerType standalone directive exists in the configuration file.

-f filename

Specify an alternate configuration file to be read instead of the standard /etc/proxy-suite/ftp-proxy.conf file.

Please note that the default path for the configuration file is a compile time option. It can be changed using the --prefix and --sysconfdir options when running the configure script - see also the INSTALL file for usage description.

-n

Do not detach from the controlling terminal. This prevents the default of becoming a daemon and is ignored if running in inetd mode. The main purpose of this option is to support the AIX System Resource Controller or similar setups, where several daemons are controlled by a master daemon.

-v level

Enable diagnostic output to be sent to the file /tmp/ftp-proxy.debug. The given level must be in the range from 0 (no output at all) to 4 (maximum verbosity). See also DIAGNOSTICS bellow.

SIGNALS

SIGTERM, SIGQUIT, SIGINT

These signals instruct FTP-Proxy to abort any existing transfer, close all connections and terminate the process. If the target of the signal is a running FTP-Proxy daemon, all current child processes wil also be terminated.

SIGHUP

This signal will be accepted if running in daemon mode and ignored in inetd mode.
It causes the FTP-Proxy to reread its configuration file and to reopen the log destination if it was changed in the configuration file, or rotated if it is a log file.
See also dedicated rotation singnal SIGUSR1 bellow.

SIGUSR1

This signal will be accepted if running in daemon mode and ignored in inetd mode.
It causes the FTP-Proxy to close its current logfile, rename it to a date and time derived value, and open a new logfile. This procedure is also known as Logfile Rotation. Child processes forked before the reception of this signal and processes run from inetd will not be affected.
See also the ServerRoot configuration option in ftp-proxy.conf(5).

NOTES

When running FTP-Proxy in inetd mode, it is always an excellent idea to check that the inetd configuration file includes a line that invokes FTP-Proxy. An example for a line in /etc/inetd.conf follows:

ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/ftp-proxy -i

Please note that this is just an example and does not provide much security, like running as a non-privileged user or using the TCP Wrapper functionality.

DIAGNOSTICS

The -v option is is only available if enabled using the --enable-debug option when running the configure script - see also the INSTALL file for usage description. This option should be used with great care only. It is strongly recommended to not to use it in production environments.

If debugging is activated, it always adds output to the file /tmp/ftp-proxy.debug which is created with 0666 mode. This allows child processes to open and write the file after they have given up their root privileges.

If the configuration file contains a ServerRoot directive, child processes and processes run from inetd will try to open the file within their chroot(2) environment. If this fails, e.g. because there is no /tmp directory, it is silently ignored and no debug output is generated.

Please note that the program makes no attempt to erase the debug file after use. Thus it will stay around with world writeability until the operator manually removes it!

FILES

/etc/proxy-suite/ftp-proxy.conf
/usr/sbin/ftp-proxy

SEE ALSO

ftp-proxy.conf(5)

The SuSE Proxy-Suite documentation included in the doc subdirectory of the package.

AUTHORS

Jens-Gero Boehm <jens-gero.boehm@suse.de>
Pieter Hollants <pieter.hollants@suse.de>
Volker Wiegand <volker.wiegand@suse.de>
Marius Tomaschewski <mt@suse.de>

COPYRIGHT

The whole SuSE Proxy-Suite is released under the
GNU General Public License (GPL).