ftp access for a user

[Ralph W. Reid]

Is there some particular reason you can not set up a personal account
for your friend and have him/her/them build the site into a
public_html directory within that account?  This technique would seem
to simplify matters considerably if it is possible on your system.
HTH and have a _great_ weekend!

On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 08:07:13PM -0500, Gregory Nowak wrote:
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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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-- 
Ralph.  N6BNO.  Wisdom comes from central processing, not from I/O.
rreid at sunset.net  http://personalweb.sunset.net/~rreid
Opinions herein are either mine or they are flame bait.
CIRCLE AREA = _pi * r ^ 2