I manage serveral servers and – for the most part – they are all set up using the Perfect Setup for Ubuntu. Overall the setup is great, but I have been noticing a very annoying delay when trying to log in via FTP. Everything works, but when I initially connect, 5 – 10 seconds pass by before I’m prompted for my login credentials. After many hours of pain and sadness, I finally discovered the solution.

Page six of the Perfect Setup tutorial says that you should add the following lines to your proftpd.conf file.

vi /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf
…
DefaultRoot ~
IdentLookups off
ServerIdent on “FTP Server ready.”
…

I found that if I include those lines inside of <Global>…</Global> tags the delay goes away and I am instantly logged into the server. So, instead of the above format, add those lines inside the Global tags like this.

vi /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf
…
<Global>
DefaultRoot ~
IdentLookups off
ServerIdent on “FTP Server ready.”
</Global>
…