[ SEA-GHOST MINI SHELL]

Troll-FTPd is a nice FTP server coded by Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra at troll.no>
from Troll Tech. Despite his lack of popularity, it has always been a very
good project, coded with the following requirements in mind :

- No useless bloat,
- No external command calls (source of most security flaws)
- RFC standards conformance,
- Easy to set up,
- User friendly,
- Secure.

The official repository for this piece of software is
ftp://ftp.troll.no/freebies/ftpd/ .

People who tried Troll-FTPd usually kept it and used it in production
servers for years without any problem. Alternatively, WU-FTPd, ProFTPd,
BeroFTPd and many others have had serious security and reliability issues,
and system administrators had to always watch for patches and new releases
to ensure a good nights sleep.

Troll-FTPd was often considered for inclusion in secure distributions, but
the project wasn't actively maintained. Release 1.25 is dated 03/1999 and has
been made with help from Janos Farkas, cmj at localnet.com, August Fullford and
Ximenes Zalteca. Troll-FTPd 1.26 was released two years after, just to fix
minor bugs. Arnt said that there won't be any other release unless he ever
moves to IPv6.

This is why I started to collect various unofficial patches over the internet,
merged them (and it wasn't painless), added my own ones, cleaned up the code,
audited it, repackaged it, rewrote the documentation... and the Pure-FTPd
project was born.

The first released version of Pure-FTPd was labeled 0.90 because I wanted
some margin before 1.00, just to add missing features that prevent people
from moving from other FTP servers. Also the documentation was in need for
a full update before version 1.00 . It was based on Troll-FTPd 1.25, and
changes from 1.26 were backported.

Troll-FTPd 1.26 and earlier are vulnerable to a local root exploit
(Troll-FTPd 1.27 was released later to fix it) . Pure-FTPd is not vulnerable
to this, and it has never been. The fix was already applied to the first
version of Pure-FTPd before the flaw was discovered and fixed in Troll-FTPd.

Thanks to Arnt for his excellent job. The Pure-FTPd project would never have
been started without it.


                       -Frank DENIS "Jedi/Sector One" <j at pureftpd dot org>