Proftpd service keeps starting by itself

What about

apt-get remove proftpd

If you need a service only very occasionally, it's a good idea to remove it and re-install it only when you need it. Thanks to apt-get, uninstalling and re-installing a package on Ubuntu is as easy as stopping and starting a service.

Also check your currently running processes. Sometimes, when you remove a package, running processes aren't properly stopped. Also, a program can hang around like a zombie even after the actual executable has been deleted.

If the restart happens on a regular basism it might also have something to do with the contents of the /etc/cron.d directory.

So it wasn't cron that was the culprit, and I didn't see it in my list of running processes. At this point I don't care either. I used:

> apt-get remove proftpd

The result:

> apt-get remove proftpd

Reading package lists… Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information… Done

Note, selecting proftpd-basic instead of proftpd

The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:

db4.8-util libfile-copy-recursive-perl update-inetd openbsd-inetd

Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.

The following packages will be REMOVED:

proftpd-basic

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

After this operation, 2187kB disk space will be freed.

Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y

(Reading database … 27060 files and directories currently installed.)

Removing proftpd-basic …

• Stopping ftp server proftpd [ OK ]

Processing triggers for man-db …

Processing triggers for ureadahead …

And guess what, it was neither running or listening on a port at that point. I wonder what "Stopping ftp server" means… :?

Anyway, that's the end of that.

@nehalem:

I wonder what "Stopping ftp server" means… :?
That's just apt-get trying to make sure that the ProFTPd service has actually stopped. As I said, services often continue to run even if you delete the executable from under their feet, so it's necessary to double-check.

Thanks for the help and explanation.