FTP and telnet

[Evan Burkitt <evan@geburkitt.com>]

I have just installed Debian 2.1 and need some advice on how to get FTP and 
telnet working. For ftp I can see that inetd runs in.ftpd when an ftp 
client attempts to connect, but the operation fails on the client side with 
"Connection closed by remote host". On the server I have a user named ftp 
in nogroup, and a home directory for it; what else am I missing?

I have the same problem with telnet: in.telnetd runs, then stops, and my 
telnet client reports "disconnected by host."

I'm new to Unix and trying to put together a system for learning purposes. 
I'm out of ideas on these two problems.

Thanks.

-eb-