IPv6 Network Administration

FTP

Most vendors that support IPv6 ship their systems with an IPv6-capable FTP daemon. Of course, you may need to tell inetd to run it—we covered the configuration of inetd in Section 7.2 earlier in this chapter. Note that even though IIS has support for IPv6, at the time of writing the Microsoft FTP server does not.

If you are running an anonymous FTP server, you may be running a more exotic FTP daemon. Wu-ftpd has been around for many years, but no new releases of it have been made for quite some time. As a consequence, no officially released version has IPv6 support, but patches are available from KAME,^[12] and when (if?) the 2.8 release is made it should support IPv6. Some systems have shipped wu-ftpd with the patch, including Red Hat 8. Red Hat 9 moved to vsftpd Version 1.1.3 for anonymous FTP, which doesn't support IPv6, but if you upgrade to Version 1.2^[13] you can get IPv6 support by changing the listen directive in vsftpd.conf to listen_ipv6.

A better choice for an anonymous IPv6 FTP server might be PureFTPd, which has supported IPv6 for a few years on Unix-like platforms. Unfortunately, the Windows version seems to lag behind its cousin in this regard. PureFTPd is available from http://www.pureftpd.org/.

One final note on FTP daemons is that, like HTTP daemons, if you process the log files from the daemon, you may need to update your log processing software to deal with IPv6 addresses. Since there isn't an FTP equivalent of CGI,^[14] you don't need to worry about CGI scripts ...