Ubuntu – Ubuntu 14.04 FTP restart

I would recommend remove (purging) your vsftp install and then reinstalling it with default conf files and starting the service and confirming it is running. I think you have a bad conf file that is causing it not to run properly.

Ubuntu 14.04 uses user sessions which was absent in 12.04, so service is looking at the user session, not the system session, and your user isn't running vstfpd(root is). So, you will need to specify --system when you use service to start, stop or check the status of a service.

vsftpd is a soft-link to upstart, so you won't be able to run it as an unprivileged user, you will need to be root to start or stop or check the status of such a process.

Doing an ls -l on /etc/init.d/vsftpd reveals:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 May 16  2013 /etc/init.d/vsftpd -> /lib/init/upstart-job*

which is similar to cron, resolvconf and a few more, which are all upstart jobs and need to be root to be started or stopped.

Upstart is an event-based replacement for the /sbin/init daemon which handles starting of tasks and services during boot, stopping them during shutdown and supervising them while the system is running.

These services are usually started on boot. See here for more on upstart:

• What is upstart

Refer man page of upstart if you want even more!

So, long story short, to start, stop, check status, you need to be root. You can do that as follows:

sudo service vsftpd {start|stop|status|restart}

and enter your password or use:

service vsftpd {start|stop|status|restart} --system