Why FireFTP, a firefox addon takes a long time to list directory contents when SSL/TLS is enabled on vsftpd in Red Hat Enterprise Linux ?

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

  • vsftpd 2.0.1-8.el4 in RHEL 4

  • vsftpd 2.0.5-16.el5 in RHEL 5

  • Firefox with FireFTP addon[Windows or Linux]

Issue

  • Why FireFTP, a firefox addon takes a long time to list directory contents when SSL/TLS is enabled on vsftpd in Red Hat Enterprise Linux ?

Resolution

Use any other FTP clients like FileZilla. Issue is noticed only with FireFTP.

Root Cause

FireFTP is a Firefox addon which is not shipped by Red Hat. It uses Mozilla API's to create SSL/TLS communication channels with VSFTP server.

It is currently considered as a bug or an issue with underlying Mozilla API's

Upstream bug tracker

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478322

vsftpd code is not at fault as it works with other clients like Putty/WinSCP/Filezilla. Issue is only noticed when vsftp package is upgraded to vsftpd-2.0.1-8.el4.x86_64.rpm in RHEL 4 and vsftpd-2.0.5-16.el5 in RHEL 5.

Both these version corrects the faulty behavior of Vsftpd.

From the changelog of vsftpd

2009-03-05 22:00:00
Jiri Skala <jskala@redhat.com> - 2.0.5-13:
- Resolves: #459607 - SSL connections are not correctly shutdown

It changes the way tls/ssl connections are closed. This fix is backported from upstream versions to the  versions that we ship with RHEL 4/5.

  • Component
  • ftp

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