Without it, chef wouldn't actually start the service, concluding
for some reason I haven't quite pinned down yet that the service was already
running.

An alternative would be to bypass chef's checks and do a chef `execute do command service start`,
but I think this is cleaner?

The matching pattern for pgrep is `^proftpd` is because the server shows up as `proftpd: (accepting connections)`

The matching against the full line in combination with `^` is needed because otherwise pgrep also matches against `/etc/init.d/proftpd`,
which maybe is why chef was failing in the first place?

this might be affecting other metasploitable services...