"The mind of a Mad Tech!"

While Cpanel comes with 2 different FTP programs; PureFTP and Proftp, there isn’t any way in Cpanel to change the default FTP ports. This leaves the server open to a possible brute force attack at the default port of 21. However by changing just one line in your FTP server configuration files, you can change up the FTP port and securing your server.

To do so, you must be logged into your server via SSH/Shell and you must use a text editior such as Nano, Pico, Vi / Vim.

Changing the port for Pure-FTP

1) Edit /etc/pure-ftpd.conf and look for the following line:

#Bind 127.0.0.1,21

The default example, 127.0.0.1, will cause the socket to bind locally but then this connection won’t serve externally. You’ll need to uncomment the line and change that to 0.0.0.0 so all IP’s will listen on that range and change the port of 40 to your desired ftp port.

2) If needed, add the new FTP port to your server’s firewall

3) Edit /etc/chkserv.d/ftpd and change the port, which is the first comma-separated entry to the right of ‘=’ on the line in the file, to match the port you put the service on.

Finally:

/etc/init.d/pure-ftpd restart
/etc/init.d/cpanel restart (restarts tailwatchd/chkservd)

Changing the port for ProFTP

Edit /etc/proftpd.conf and change:

Port 21

Tags: Cpanel, proftp, pureftp

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 7:34 am and is filed under Cpanel, Plesk, Technology Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.