Hi everyone,

I have done something incredibly stupid I did a reformat / clean install and have lost the FTP login details for my linode. I still have access through Putty (SSH?) and my database with PHPMyAdmin which use different login details. I have used the "Reset Root Password" tool, which I think changes the FTP password, and if that is the case then I just need to find the username.

So I guess my question is, with Putty access is there any way I can find my FTP username?

PS I have used tried to use file recovery to find the username from the Firefox on my previous Windows (I had it stored on FireFTP) but had no luck recovering it.

Thanks,

Jonty

There is no "ftp login". The ftpd uses the same authentication mechanism(s) that Lunux itself does, or, in some cases, can be set up to use an external database such as MySQL.

If you've created a non-root account for yourself (and you certainly should have) then you can use that username and password for ftp. If you've restricted ftp in some way it might not work, but the likelihood is, it will.

On the other hand, you should avoid ftp in any case and use sftp which runs from ssh and is much more secure. The password exchange in ftp is cleartext and easily sniffed by bad guys. If you use sftp you can do everything while keeping your password secret.

I would suggest Cyberduck as a free, Windows and OS X sftp client (it does much more, too).

Hey, thanks for getting back to me. I think the problem was that a friend set-up regular FTP (not SFTP) for me a long time ago and I've been using that ever since. At least I always thought I was using FTP and not SFTP.

Anyway, I've logged in using SFTP so I'll use that from now on. I'll try to get hold of my friend (he's disappeared) and look into removing FTP access, if that's indeed what I was using before.

I am still using my root account, but I'll look into making a non-root one immediately.

Thanks for the help

If you did a clean format/reinstall, there will not be an FTP server by default unless you installed one