It’s been a while since my last entry here. No, I am not dead (yet).

I finally managed to release my first FreeBSD port to the public. It is the OpenBSD ftp-proxy(8) program, which was rewritten from scratch by the OpenBSD guys. I have been waiting for a port for ages now, so I finally came up with my own solution.

The proxy uses the anchor facility of the pf firewall. This is a very neat design, since you can handle virtually every situation of a firewalled FTP server. Of course, the program comes privilege separated, as it is OpenBSD best-practice. Fortunately the daemon user “proxy” is already in the base system for the old ftp-proxy.

A word of warning though: Please do not confuse with the man pages, since both ftp-proxy programs, the one in ports and the one in the base system, have their man page in section 8. Do not forget to disable the base system version in /etc/inetd.conf. The new version comes with a handy rc-script.