Recently I needed to test against an FTPS server. No big deal, I thought to myself, I’ll just set one up real quick. Boy did I end up having a hard time with that. Not because the task was actually hard but because there’s a bit of a general haziness about the whole idea of what FTPS is. More on that later.

The first thing I did was setup my Debian ProFTPD server via the included /etc/proftpd/tls.conf. Restarted ProFTPD, and then tried curl -v -v -k ‘ftps://localhost’ which immediately resulted in the following error

* About to connect() to localhost port 990 (#0)
*   Trying 127.0.0.1... Connection refused
* couldn't connect to host
* Closing connection #0
curl: (7) couldn't connect to host

Oh, right, It’s listening on port 21 not port 990… curl -v -v -k ftps://localhost:21/ which gave me this error

* About to connect() to localhost port 21 (#0)
*   Trying 127.0.0.1... connected
* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 21 (#0)
* successfully set certificate verify locations:
*   CAfile: none
  CApath: /etc/ssl/certs
* SSLv3, TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
* error:140770FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol
* Closing connection #0
curl: (35) error:140770FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol

Believe it, or not, I got stuck here for more than an entire day. Which is kind of embarrassing. I googled the hell out of this issue, and got lots of advice which centered about generating appropriate certs, and using “openssl s_client -connect 127.0.0.1:21” to test (which resulted in, essentially, the same error: “14996:error:140770FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol:s23_clnt.c:607:” )

With the help of a friend from work we found what I had been overlooking. You see FTPS can mean one of two very different things.

FTPS can mean FTP with explicit SSL. This is where you connect to FTP, then give a command to encrypt the session after the initial plaintext connection has been established.

FTPS can also mean FTP with implicit SSL. This is where you connect to the ftp server and the connection is encrypted before any commands are sent (this is like having HTTP on port 80 and HTTPS on port 443, except using 21 and 990 for FTP.)

The two types of FTPS are not compatible with one another. Apparently FTPS/Implicit is no longer a part of the standard, but still “around” and “supported” by “things”. And curl thinks you mean this when you give it a url of ftps://something. FTPS/Implicit is also the kind of stream that “openssl s_client -connect 127.0.0.1:21” would test. FTPS/Implicit is not the configuration setup by /etc/proftpd/tls.conf. Which is why my testing failed, frustratingly, for so long.

Since ProFTPD uses FTPS/Explicit by default… how do you test? With very similar commands to the ones I used previously (lending to the confusion…)

openssl s_client -connect 127.0.0.1:21 -starttls ftp

curl -v -v -k --ftp-ssl ftp://localhost:21/

Ok. Now I’m able to setup and test an FTP/E server. What if I also need to setup and test an FTP/I server too? Thats pretty simple. in ProFTPD 1.3.3rc2, the mod_tls module was enhanced to support implicit FTPS via the UseImplicitSSL TLSOption. So by adding “TLSOption UseImplicitSSL” on an appropriately new version of ProFTPD and mod_tls you can have a server that works with “curl -v -v -k ftps://localhost:21/” and “openssl s_client -connect 127.0.0.1:21”

I hope that this saves someone else the headaches that going through all of this gave me. Had I read through the ProFTPD TLS howto carefully, instead of just searching for what I thought I needed, I would have solved this all much more quickly.