The “vsftpd-webmin” module from 2009 triggers an endless loop when you do:
foreign_require(“vsftpd”)
This is problematic because webmin’s own config-lib.pl does this before attempting to parse the config file when saving the module configuration. (around line 280)
I think the module tries to do something fancy with internal modularization that it shouldn’t. I’m not the original author but I’ve been working on bringing it up to date, and it works fine now apart from the above issue.
My first question to the community is: Where exactly is foreign_require implemented? I haven’t been able to find it, since there are nearly 1000 references to it in the codebase on github. If I can see how it’s implemented it will help me understand what part of vsftpd triggers this.
Responding to myself: I figured out what triggered the endless loop. “ReadParse” was called in the core library (vsftpd-lib.pl) instead of in each relevant cgi script.
Good question! I chose vsftpd because it’s more light-weight, as well as straight forward to set up an insecure FTP server.
My primary usecase is running the server on a low powered device such as an RPi Zero, together with the SCSI emulator software PiSCSI and other file sharing services. The FTP server is serving very old retro computers, hence the insecure setup.
Anyhow, the research I did a few months ago suggested that vsftpd is the better choice over proftpd for this particular scenario. Please correct me if I got the wrong impression.
