Quickly Create an FTP Server on Your EC2 Instance

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Set up VSFTPD on an AWS EC2 instance — fixes for the 500 OOPS priv_sock_get_int error and FileZilla passive mode hanging on EC2 security groups.

Author

B. Talvinder

Published

July 4, 2014

Setting up an FTP server on EC2 using VSFTPD is well-documented in general, but EC2’s security model and the Ubuntu kernel introduce two specific problems that most tutorials skip over. The base VSFTPD install will appear to work but fail in practice — once with a cryptic privilege error on startup, and once with FileZilla hanging indefinitely when trying to connect.

After crawling through scores of pages, I found a tutorial that works like a charm for the base setup. These are the two gaps it left, and how to fill them:

500 OOPS: priv_sock_get_int

Fix: add to /etc/vsftpd.conf:

seccomp_sandbox=NO

Passive mode in FileZilla

If FileZilla hangs on “Sent PASSIVE reply”, you need to configure passive port ranges in your VSFTPD config and open those ports in your EC2 security group.

With those two fixes in place, VSFTPD runs reliably on EC2 and FileZilla connects without issue.

---
title: "Quickly Create an FTP Server on Your EC2 Instance"
description: "Set up VSFTPD on an AWS EC2 instance — fixes for the 500 OOPS priv_sock_get_int error and FileZilla passive mode hanging on EC2 security groups."
date: 2014-07-04
categories: [AWS, Server, DevOps, Archive]
draft: false
---

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From the Archive
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Originally published in 2014 on talvinder.com. Some technical details may be outdated, but this remains here as part of the archive.
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Setting up an FTP server on EC2 using VSFTPD is well-documented in general, but EC2's security model and the Ubuntu kernel introduce two specific problems that most tutorials skip over. The base VSFTPD install will appear to work but fail in practice — once with a cryptic privilege error on startup, and once with FileZilla hanging indefinitely when trying to connect.

After crawling through scores of pages, I found a tutorial that works like a charm for the base setup. These are the two gaps it left, and how to fill them:

### 500 OOPS: priv_sock_get_int

Fix: add to `/etc/vsftpd.conf`:

```
seccomp_sandbox=NO
```

### Passive mode in FileZilla

If FileZilla hangs on "Sent PASSIVE reply", you need to configure passive port ranges in your VSFTPD config and open those ports in your EC2 security group.

With those two fixes in place, VSFTPD runs reliably on EC2 and FileZilla connects without issue.