ftp access for a user

[Gregory Nowak]

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Hi all.

I will be temporarily hosting a couple of web sites for a friend of
mine. Let's say that all his stuff will be located under
/var/www/htdocs/sites. My friend has a regular login account on my
system, which we'll refer to as user. What I'd like to do, is to set
things up, so that whatever he uploads to /var/www/htdocs/sites via
ftp will be immediately accessible via the web, without my
intervention. He should of course have read/write access to
/var/www/htdocs/sites and subdirectories, so that he can replace his
contents in those directories. Also, the rest of the world should have
execute permission to the directories, and read-only access to the
files for web browsing purposes.

What I at first wanted to do, was to give him a totally different user
name and password, as a virtual user on my ftp server. However, proftpd
seems to have no virtual user facility. 

So, what I've settled for doing is to give him  ftp access as user,
but with a password different from that for his regular account (which
seems to be doable with proftpd's UserPassword directive), and chroot
his ftp transfers to /home/user/sites. I would then also have a
symlink /var/www/htdocs/sites pointing to /home/user/sites. 

My main problem here is that of ownership and
permissions. Specifically, how can I ensure that whatever he uploads
via ftp to ~user/sites will have ownership of root.adm (which is the
ownership of everything in /var/www/htdocs on my system), and
permissions of 755 for the directories he creates, and 644 for the
files he uploads?

In case some of you are wondering, yes, I could do things via sftp,
but using plain old ftp is going to be more convenient for him. Thanks
in advance for any ideas.

Greg

P.S. In what context in proftpd.conf would I place the UserPassword
and chroot directives, so that they would both apply to the same thing
(I.E. chroot user into /home/user/sites)?

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