1.237.  vsftpd

previously, the length of vsftpd usernames was limited to 32 characters in length. With this updated package, the maximum length of vsftpd usernames has been increased to 128 characters. (BZ#496846)

in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the default value for the 'background' option was changed to 'NO'. This revealed a race condition in the way vsftpd processed signals whenever child processes were forked. As a result of this race condition, attempts to run vsftpd could fail without returning an error code if another FTP service was also running. In this situation, a user would not be notified that vsftpd failed to run. This update implements extra routines for signal handling that fixes the race condition, ensuring that vsftpd returns a proper error code whenever it fails to start. (BZ#236707)

the init script for this update is now POSIX-compliant. This corrects a bug that could cause vsftpd to incorrectly return a zero exit code when it failed to start. (BZ#431451)

a bug in the dependencies between vsftpd parent and child processes allowed those child processes to run even though their parent process was already terminated. As such, terminating the vsftpd service did not reliably stop all FTP connections initiated by vsftpd, which could pose a security risk. This update fixes the child-parent process dependency bug by adding several functions that terminate all vsftpd child processes whenever their parent process is stopped. (BZ#441485)

a bug caused the vsftpd daemon to not properly shut down SSL (Secure Socket Layer) data connections, which led to interoperability problems between the vsftpd daemon and client programs such as FileZilla. This has been fixed in this update so that vsftpd no longer causes problems with client applications. (BZ#459607)

in previous versions of vsftpd, /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf specified /var/log/vsftpd.log as its default log file. However, this was different from the specified default log file (i.e. /var/log/xferlog) in /etc/logrotate.d/vsftpd.log. This prevented the logrotate script from finding -- and consequently, rotating -- the vsftpd log file, resulting in an unnecessarily large vsftpd log. This update corrects this issue by specifying /var/log/xferlog as its default log file in /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf, which enables log rotation on vsftpd log files. (BZ#460067)

this update also fixes several typographical errors in the documentation of some parameters in the vsftpd man page. (BZ#478526)

vsftpd cannot locate usernames specified by the chown_username parameter if the username is trailed by whitespace. This update contains a workaround that trims trailing whitespaces from username values of chown_username. (BZ#486259)

the maximum username length is now 128 characters. In previous versions, the maximum username was only 32 characters. (BZ#486524)

the DNS reverse lookup feature was implemented without any way to disable it. This update contains the parameter 'reverse_lookup_enable', which allows users to enable or disable the DNS reverse lookup functionality. (BZ#498548)