If your FTP connection through Plesk fails, there are a few things you can check first.
1. Log into the server via SSH (if you are using windows, you will need a SSH client. I use Putty
2. Make sure you access su (root access).
Now that you are logged in, type te following;
ftp localhost
If you get the message of;
Connected to localhost(127.0.0.1).
220 ProFTPD 1.3.0 Server(ProFTPD)[127.0.0.1]
Name(localhost:user):
Then the ftp server is working correctly. However if you do not get that, but instead get this;
ftp:connect:Connection refused
Then there is an issue on the server. So to look into this further we need to make sure that the ftp service is running. Since this is Plesk, it will be running Proftpd and it will be running out of the Xinetd service. To verif y this, type the following;
service xinetd status
You should get the following;
xinetd (pid 23532) is running…
Now type;
lsof -i tcp:21
You should get;
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME xinetd 23532 root 5u IPv4 55265282 TCP *:ftp (LISTEN)
If you do, please try to run the FTP localhost command again.
Ftp localhost
If you get a message that states that service is not available, likely the problem is with the hostname isn’t set correctly.
To check the hostname, you simply need to type hostname at the server command line. It will return the hostname. To change this, you will want to log into plesk and goto Server>Server Preferences and change it here. You will also want to type hostname and the name at the command line. As an example, if I wanted to change it on my server, I would type;
Hostname myservername.com
The name will then take affect. Once you have done this, restart Xinetd.
Lastly, if all else fails, you can review the log files for the service by using the following commands;
less /var/log/messages | grep proftp
less /var/log/messages | grep xinetd
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