The WU-FTPD FTP server Unofficial Patch Page

Last update: 7 January, 2012

WU-FTPD is a long-lived replacement FTP server daemon for UNIX and UNIX-like systems such as FreeBSD and Linux. It is not available under Windows. It was first created at Washington University in St. Louis during the early days of the Internet prior to the network going commercial.

Over the years successive people have inherited the codebase and passed it on amongst themselves, until ultimately it ended up in limbo in late 2001 from a public view. Several security patches were subsequently released but the development continued quietly until wu-ftpd.org went offline.

Since then various people (including some members of the WU-FTPD Development Group) have contributed some patches and enhancements to the code. Since 2002, one production site, has been operating on the modified codebase with great success. While some would say that it is time to make those modifications public, the first order of business is to consolidate security patches.

Today the latest official release by the WU-FTPD Development Group still remains at 2.6.2, with various vendors releasing patches for their own copies of wu-ftpd. The software comes with its own BSD-like license. The first release, -CC1, is simply the latest CVS snapshot extant before the main site went offline, plus some slight fixes. See the roadmap below for more details. The version number commences with 2.8.0 since 2.7.0 was not an official release.

The Canadian Contigent Release

This is the start of a new series of patches, done along the same tradition as previous ones before it (ACADEM, VR, etc.). As described in the README.CC note, this patch series aims to continue the work done before and consolidate outstanding patches.

The following is a release of the WU-FTPD server, with the higher CC number being the latest version:

Future Releases and Roadmap

Future releases are being considered to incorporate many downstream patches collected around the Internet (including the ones below if not already included) and contributed by various UNIX variants. The next planned releases will include:

CC1 - Released April 22, 2009
First release based on original CVS codebase with latest security patches applied. This will likely be a reference patch acting as a base for all proceding patches. It is also a candidate for rigorous testing of its various features.
CC2 - Released June 26, 2009
Patches for timed access classes, patches from FreeBSD, some from Debian plus some portability patches and other fixes; Updating of GNU autoconf/automake build mechanism; autobuf patch.
CC3 - Released November 7, 2011
Incorporation of remaining downstream patches from Debian Linux among others; Solaris patch review, full RFC 3659 implementation.
CC4 - Released January 7, 2012
Bug fixes and feature enhancement tweaks.
CC5
Patches based upon work from GLOBUS Alliance, server load limiting.
Start of internationalisation support using gettext.
CC6
RFC review and IETF Internet Draft review

Tested platforms

The following operating systems and platforms have been used to test releases:

Other Patches for the WU-FTPD FTP server daemon

Here are some patches (applied against the 2.6.2 codebase) that the user community have released over the years and are kept here for reference:

Supported RFCs

The following RFCs are supported in the most current releases of wu-ftpd:

Draft IETF Documents

While the server does not support any of these documents, it is useful to collect them for reference in case future work incorporates these proposals.

Server Documentation

Gasp! Documentation?

While the documentation isn't really located in one convenient place, there's actually quite a lot of it:

Contributing

If you wish to contribute patches, please do so by sending a unified diff. The proper command line is diff -Nur old new > patch.diff.

References

Contact

You can contact the maintainer of this page and patches at: with 'WU-FTPD' in the Subject line of your email. Please note that we cannot answer end-user support requests: Instead use a search engine to seek the WU-FTPD discussion list archives as most answers are found there. Note also that if you are using a packaged version of WU-FTPD, you should ask the package maintainers first about any problems you experience, as we cannot speak for their (likely) modifications.