vsftp 421 Service not available, remote server has closed connection with vsftp and its solution

Tuesday, 15th June 2010

I’ve spend almost an hour trying to isolate a problem that persisted with slow ftp transfers .
First I thought the slowness is because of some kind of firewall rules, anyways I’ve tested disabling the iptablesfirewall rules and the effect was absolutely the same.
I was able to login normally to the newly configured vsftp server on Debian installed through:

debian-server:~# apt-get install vsftpd The vsftp is configured to run as a stand alone service and not via inetd. A copy from the non-working vsftpd.conf can be obtained from here
I couldn’t find any fault or misconfigured variable in the above mentioned ftp configuration file.
The file doesn’t contain neither a syntax nor logical errors. The Vsftpd service was running as a daemon perfectly fine.
I read online about some suggestions that something could be wrong with my /etc/hosts.allow or /etc/hosts.deny files but neither of them doesn’t contained any deny rules.
Though I tried entering the following line to /etc/hosts.allow:

vsftpd: ALL: ALLOW

Guess what nothing changed, the uploading slowness and the error message:

421 Service not available, remote server timed out. Connection closed

was at hand.

I tried even transffering data files on localhost whilest the firewall was disabled using:

debian-server:~# ftp 0
Connected to 0 (0.0.0.0).
user: hipo
pass: *********
ftp>put file.tar.gz
229 Entering Extended Passive Mode
150 Ok to send data.

421 Service not available, remote server timed out. Connection closed

I also tried raising up the data_connection_timeout which by default was equal to 120 secs to data_connection_timeout=720

This doesn’t help as well. Lest that I tried also to fix the issue through changes in the following vsftp variables:
connect_from_port_20=NO
xferlog_enable=NO
local_max_rate=50max_per_ip=40
max_clients=50

Nomatter what I tried the shitty transfer timeout error was determined to reappear:
421 Service not available, remote server timed out. Connection closed

Pretty much like problems passing through an arcade game super-boss ! ghh ..
Following some forum suggestions that might help resolving the error I tried also the vsftpd conf variables:

pasv_enable=YES
pasv_min_port=11000
pasv_max_port=11010

Again the 421 Service not available, remote server timed out. Connection closed during a file transfer occured!

That completely pissed me off, so I did a radical decision. Just wipe out vsftpdand exchange it for the easier to implement and less problematic good old PROFTPD
My experience with proftpd as a server ftp daemon was most of times positive. It was luckily like this also this time!

The swith to proftpd on the server was a piece of a sweety cake:

debian-server:~# apt-get install proftpd

There you go now transfer works and the 421 Service not available, remote server timed out. Connection closed is solved in a radical and very easy manner!

Yet if you continue experiencing some kind of data transfer errors or ftp login errors I recommend you load the nf_conntrack_ftp if you’re running linux kernel > 2.19, if you’re using an older kernel version then you should load the ip_conntrack_ftp kernel module.
To make kernel loadable during system boot time do execute:
debian-server:~# echo nf_conntrack_ftp >> /etc/modules

To prevent FTP data transactions caused by iptables firewall rules I suggest you also check my article Iptables Open FTP Port 21 and 20 to enable your Linux firewall in and out FTP server data transfer to flow

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2 Responses to “vsftp 421 Service not available, remote server has closed connection with vsftp and its solution”

  1. Andrej Sevčnikar says:
    Google Chrome 38.0.2125.111 Google Chrome 38.0.2125.111 Windows 7 x64 Edition Windows 7 x64 Edition
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.111 Safari/537.36

    Add/enable this line in /etc/vsftpd.conf

    seccomp_sandbox=NO

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