FTP Help
Hi folks,
I am taking over for an IT admin that left in a hurry. Our organization has an old web site hosted on a Linode server and from what I can tell the Linode server is Ubuntu and the web server running on it is Apache. We want to take the old web site offline, but backup all the web site files first, then transfer them to a different cloud storage we have. Unfortunately, I am not a Linux guy at all. I followed some of the help guides and videos on here and got VSFTPD installed / running and created a FTP user account. Problem is I can't get FileZilla to connect. When I put in the IP, username, password and port number (21) I get "Connection established, waiting for welcome message…" and it hangs there until the connection times out. If I try port 22 for SFTP, it doesn't even say "Connection established". Would anyone have any ideas of why FileZilla might not be able to connect or any advice on how I should handle downloading the site files differently, etc? Any help is appreciated.
Thanks!
3 Replies
CassandraD
Linode Staff
I imagine it's difficult taking over administering a server someone else set up. You may want to start by using some tools to see if something they did is preventing you from using Filezilla.
First, I recommend running nmap on your IP address to see if ports 21 or 22 are filtered, which would suggest a firewall could be blocking it. This post discusses understanding nmap results. If either shows up as filtered, you can use this guide for help with Troubleshooting Firewalls.
I also went over a few possible issues with Filezilla in this post, including the possibility that the server was secured so that you can't log in over root or using a password for authentication.
If that doesn't help, you can look through other options for transfer files in our docs. Our guide to clean install upgrades has a section about transfering the files needed for websites that includes a section on copying databases that might be useful for what you're doing here.
If you have the root username and password you can SSH directly into the server using FileZilla and download any files you need, provided SSH is enabled. To check you can run the command
sudo systemctl status ssh
If it's disabled, run the command
sudo ufw allow ssh
If you don't have the root password but have access to the linode dashboard you can reset the root password. Dashboard --> Linodes --> click package in question --> Switch to Settings --> Reset Root Password.
For FileZilla you open Site Manager and select the protocol "SFTP - SSH File Transfer Protocol" enter the ip and away you go.
Hope this helps.
dh-otm
Thanks CassandraD and dh-otm for your help and advice. Both of your posts helped me. I used the "sudo ufw allow ssh" command to allow logging into the server with SFTP. I found another post from someone else that allowed me to edit sshd_config (sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config) so clear text passwords would be accepted. Once that was fixed, I was able to log right in via FileZilla! Thank you both again.