Simon Willison’s Weblog

Contribute / ProFTPd problem solved

19th November 2003

After further analysis of the Contribute problem described earlier, we discovered that Contribute was opening a new FTP connection every time we clicked a link within the application even before we had hit the “edit page” button to fire up the editing mode. Switching the connection over to use SFTP instead of FTP had the same problem, with a secure connection being opened for each link we clicked instead. The connections remained open until we shut down Contribute.

My hunch is that this could be an obscure bug that only surfaces when Contribute is used with ProFTPd 1.2.9. At any rate, we’ve solved the problem by setting the MaxClientsPerUser directive in the ProFTPd configuration file. Contribute doesn’t seem to mind in the slightest.