> I've installed proftpd, and it works while inetd.conf is not configured
> for ftp. HOWEVER, when I add the following line to the inetd.conf, and
> kill the proftpd process, inetd doesn't seem to be able to start the
> program on its own.
Okay, downloading and compiling proftpd confirmed what I thought: you
need to configure proftpd to work properly with a "super-daemon" like
inetd. You can't just point inetd at an arbitrary daemon; you point it to
an executable that handles an incoming connection passed to it by inetd.
The best analogy I can think of in my present fatigued state is trying to
put a line like
inet stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/inetd
in your inetd.conf; you're passing a connection to an inappropriate sort
of server in the first place.
The solution here should be to change the line
ServerType standalone
to
ServerType inetd
in your proftpd.conf file, which appears to be searched for by default in
/usr/local/etc/proftpd. I've never run it, though, so I'm not sure.
Your problem might be even more basic; some of proftpd's sample
configuration files contain stuff that won't work out of the box. For
instance, you can't set it to run in group "nogroup" if you don't have a
group called "nogroup." Try runing proftpd on the command line; you'll
get an error if you're in inetd mode, but it should be a network error,
not a configuration-file error.
Hope that helps,
Shawn