Unable to use FTP command to connect from one server to another

Hi,

I have two unix servers A and B. from A i am trying to use the ftp command to connect to B but I am getting the "ftp: connect: A remote host refused an attempted connect operation."
I checked the following things :
1.) Unix Server details for A and B after running the command uname -a
server A :
AIX A 3 5 XXXX
server B :
Linux B 2.6.18-164.2.1.el5 #1 SMP Mon Sep 21 04:37:42 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

2.) I checked the services file in /etc folder and i have the entries

ftp-data 20/tcp
ftp 21/tcp 

and both are not commented.
3.)There were no such files like ftpaccess,ftpgroups,ftphosts,ftpusers in /etc folder.
4.) When i gave the command "ps -fe | grep ftpd", no rows were fetched.
5.) I also ran the following command to check if ftp is installed.
"rpm -q ftp" and I got the output as "ftp-0.17-35.el5".
6.) When i ran the command "rpm -q vsftpd" to see if the vsftpd package is installed, I got the result as "package vsftpd is not installed".
Does this mean that FTP is not installed in my unix server or is some firewall blocking? I am able to do ssh and scp from the same server. If it is a firewall issue, please let me know how to resolve the same?
If ftp is not installed, will the installation of vsftpd package solve the issue or is there anything else I need to take care of?
Please help me.
Thanks in advance.

try to telnet over to server B on port 20. If you get connection refused then the port is disabled on the remote box. Linux by default has ftp in the distribution. Your server does not have vsftpd installed based on your output.

Let's start here.

telnet serverB 20

let us know what happened.

Hi Jim,

I checked as told by u. When I gave the command "telnet serverB 20" , I got the below output

Trying...
telnet: connect: A remote host refused an attempted connect operation.

So, is it like ftp will work once the port 20 is enabled on the server B or the vsftpd package also has to be installed on that server for ftp to work?

Thanks.

Hi,
seems that ftp server is not installed on the Linux, to double check type chkconfig | grep ftp .

If this is confirmed give a try to man sftp ("sftp") client.