[CentOS] should vsftpd be disabled in favour of sftp for security reasons?

Sat Sep 18 18:48:31 UTC 2010
Emmett Culley <emmett at webengineer.com>

On 09/17/2010 02:51 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> 
>    (another in an ongoing list of things i just want to clarify for the
> sake of future courses taught on centos.)
> 
>    from this RHEL doc page:
> 
> http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Deployment_Guide/s1-openssh-server-config.html
> 
> the reader is advised to, for the sake of security, remove/disable
> vsftpd, ostensibly in favour of sftp/sftp-server.  really?
> 
>    i can obviously see disallowing stuff like telnet and rsh and
> rlogin, that's a no-brainer.  but advising against vsftpd for the sake
> of security?  i'm not sure i see the logic in that.  thoughts?
> 
> rday
> 
We use vsftpd as an FTPS only server in CHROOT mode.  The only reason we don't user sftp instead is because it cannot (easily?) CHROOT users.

Emmett