frustrated

[nix4me]

Just changed my server to 8.04 and i have a serious issue with proftpd. The service does not always start after a reboot. I have no idea why. When it doesn't start, i can manually restart it and it runs fine. Any ideas why it's not working every time?

[HalPomeranz]

I don't have a lot of experience with ProFTPD, but the first thing I'd do is check the logs to see if there are any error messages that might indicate what's wrong...

[nix4me]

I see nothing in the logs about it. Which log should I see a failed process start?

[HalPomeranz]

You may see something in /var/log/messages ("grep -i proftp /var/log/messages"), but my guess is that ProFTPD has its own log files. Can you tell from looking at the ProFTPD config file where it's putting its logs?

Alternatively, you might try:

find /var/log -type f | xargs grep -li proftp

The above command will give you a list of all files under /var/log that contain the string "proftp" (case-insensitive match).

[nix4me]

i see nothing pertaining to a failed start. This is frustrating. A manual start works fine. Could it be that proftpd is trying to start before networkmanager has the network up?

I see no way to switch from networkmanager to network to try it though.

[HalPomeranz]

Well, as an ugly work-around you could put something like this in /etc/rc.local:

# Start ProFTP if it didn't start properly at boot time
if [ ! "`lsof -t -c proftpd`" ]; then
        /etc/init.d/proftpd start
fi

Still it would be better to figure out why it's bombing during the normal startup. Maybe turning up the debugging level higher?

[nix4me]

Fixed. It was networkmanager. Networkmanager starts too late in the boot process and thus proftpd was starting before it, which was causing it not to start.

I changed network to non roaming mode and all seems fine now.

[cdtech]

That dosen't seem like a fix but rather a workaround. How did you do the upgrade. I'm sure your using run level 2 (command line - runlevel). Check the etc/rc2.d folder and see if your S50proftpd link is there and that it starts with an "S" and not a "K" and in which order it runs at. Mine starts at "S50" you can change the order.

[hyper_ch]

it is also adviced to use a descriptive topic title, that means a topic title that gives some clue about the content in the thread itself...

a generic topic title like "noob here" or "need help" does not help at all. As you may have notices, just about everyone posting in here has some kind of a problem or issue or question

[nix4me]

That dosen't seem like a fix but rather a workaround. How did you do the upgrade. I'm sure your using run level 2 (command line - runlevel). Check the etc/rc2.d folder and see if your S50proftpd link is there and that it starts with an "S" and not a "K" and in which order it runs at. Mine starts at "S50" you can change the order.

It is S50 in the rc2.d.

All I know is that it works perfectly now since i unticked "roaming mode" in the network applet and set the configuration to DHCP.