I really have been making some dumb mistakes the last few days.
Im suffering from a strange flu, so I think I will blame that on my scatterbrain and tendency to make the smallest problem a 3 hour ordeal.

Anyway, whilst sorting out my Virtualbox VM (Ubuntu Server) another of my php scripts broke. At the time, of course I presumed that it couldnt possibly have been anything I'd done, so proceeded to spend the next few hours scouring the web for others with similar problems.

Turns out in my inpatience, my first assumption was correct, which was that I had no ftp module installed on the machine.

A simple apt-get install proftpd would fix it right?
Yep, should have, but the download failed and three coffees later  I remembered that earlier, I had been playing with my hostnames and my vm wasnt getting an internet connection.

Doh.

Fixed the hostname problem, then installed proftp which of course opened up port 21 and all is good with the world again.