Raspberry Pi FTP server

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I’ve been trying to resurrect my SIP-connected Cisco 7940 as part of a review of our home telephony arrangements. In order to do this, I’ve had to configure the TFTP capabilities on my home infrastructure server (i.e .my Raspberry Pi). Previously, I’d served the phone configuration from a Windows TFTP server (long since gone) and the phone had just kept going with the old settings. Now, with configuration changes required, I’ve started to use dnsmasq for TFTP as well as DNS and DHCP (actually, that had always been configured, but without any files on the Pi to serve from TFTP)!

So, how to easily transfer the files? FTP to the rescue. I followed the Pi My Life UP guide to install vsftpd on my Pi, which meant using the following commands:

  1. Update packages and install vsftpd:
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install vsftpd
  2. Edit the vsftpd config with sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf, making sure it has the following entries:
    anonymous_enable=NO
    local_enable=YES
    write_enable=YES
    local_umask=022
    chroot_local_user=YES
    user_sub_token=$USER
    local_root=/home/$USER/ftp
  3. Create the folder to use for FTP and set the permissions:
    mkdir /home/pi/ftp
    mkdir /home/pi/ftp/files
    chmod a-w /home/pi/ftp
  4. Restart the FTP service with sudo service vsftpd restart.

After this, I could easily upload the files I needed to the folder that I’m serving TFTP from (/home/pi/ftp/files) – although for some reason the FTP server was listening on port 22 (not 21), and then distribute my new phone configuration…