I realize this is probably only relevant to about 3 of the readers, but I’m posting this so I don’t forget how to do it myself! In my efforts to ban the completely insecure FTP protocol from my life entirely, I’ve decided to disable the FTP service running on the How-To Geek server, which is running the CentOS operating system.

For whatever reason, I couldn’t find a place in plesk to do this, and I just despise everything about plesk anyway… so I took the manual approach.

First, look in your /etc/xinetd.d/ directory and see if there’s a file named psa_ftp in there. If not, you might have to make this change in your /etc/xinetd.conf file.

Open up the file as root, and look for the following section:

service ftp
{
        disable         = yes
        socket_type     = stream
        protocol        = tcp
        wait            = no
        user            = root
        instances       = UNLIMITED
        server          = /usr/sbin/in.proftpd
        server_args     = -c /etc/proftpd.conf
}

Change the disable = no line to disable = yes as shown above.

Run the following command to restart xinetd

/etc/init.d/xinetd restart

Good to go!