We upgraded our main shared hosting Xserve this weekend from Panther Server to Tiger Server.

The next day we started to get some complaints about weird directory changes. Since we didn’t move anything around, we were sure these customers were crazy or something. ;-)  We also had some issues with the permissions not being set correctly on newly uploaded items. Apache couldn’t see the items. I had fought with the OS X Server FTP umask settings in the past and ended up having to lock the ftpaccess file because even opening the FTP screen in Server Admin would cause my defumask setting to be blown away. (I wanted a umask setting of 0002)

In the course of investigating these issues, we found that the Tiger Upgrader kept the old FTP server launch info around and was using ftpd instead of xftpd. I figured this out by checking the entries for /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist on a system that had had a fresh 10.4 server install. Once I copied over the correct directives and did a launchctl unload and load, FTP service behavior returned to “normal”.

Ugh. Thanks, Apple.

Now, I have to go back to all the systems we’ve upgraded from 10.3 to 10.4 and make sure this nonsense hasn’t happened anywhere else.

Posted by Brian Blood in OS X Server