CentOS - Jan 2006 - vsftpd bug "or" feature ?

greetings

today i was expanding my knowledge of vsftpd on a low traffic CentOS 4
production environment server i have

fyi, i was working on learning to setup a chroot environment by the simple
editing of /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf

so, as i normally do when i start making changes i did this

cd /etc/vsftpd/
cp -a vsftpd.conf bak-vsftpd.conf

then i made the edits in /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf that i needed to make for
testing a chroot env for some users and saved my work

then i did this

service vsftpd stop
service vsftpd start

and to my amazement when i did a

ps ax

that i saw the vsftpd process had taken bak-vsftpd.conf as it's default
config file and looked something like this

8890 pts/0    S      0:00 /usr/sbin/vsftpd /etc/vsftpd/bak-vsftpd.conf

questions...

known issue?

can anyone duplicate?

is it a bug?????? or a feature???

;->

thanks and kind regards,

 - rh

--
Robert Hanson - Abba Communications
   Computer & Internet Services
 (509) 624-7159 - www.abbacomm.net

On Jan 17, 2006, at 12:12 PM, Robert Hanson wrote:
> known issue?
>
> can anyone duplicate?
>
> is it a bug?????? or a feature???
this is a feature.

here's the start() function for /etc/init.d/vsftpd:

start() {
         # Start daemons.

         if [ -d /etc/vsftpd ] ; then
                 for i in `ls /etc/vsftpd/*.conf`; do
                         site=`basename $i .conf`
                         echo -n $"Starting $prog for $site: "
                         /usr/sbin/vsftpd $i &
                         RETVAL=$?
                         [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && {
                            touch /var/lock/subsys/$prog
                            success $"$prog $site"
                         }
                         echo
                 done
         else
                 RETVAL=1
         fi
         return $RETVAL
}

look at the loop that starts on the fifth line of the function; this  
loops through every .conf file in the vsftpd config directory (thus  
enabling you to run multiple ftp sites with different configurations  
off of a single machine).

if you want your backup file to be exempt, call it "vsftp.conf.bak"  
instead.  i'm surprised this issue hasn't bitten you earlier.

-steve

---
If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an  
improbable fiction. - Fabian, Twelfth Night, III,v