ProFTPd access to /var/www

[Avi Greenbury]

Oliver Marshall wrote:

> I'm currently running ProFTPd (using the GADMIN GUI). I gave up
> trying to create a dedicated user for this party and just used the
> logon details of the main account on the server.

This is by far the easiest way normally. Create a user whose home
directory is wherever you want to be able to FTP to, and make sure
they've all the permissions on that directory.

useradd -d /var/www/ ftpuser

will create an user called 'ftpuser' with a home directory of /var/www,
you'll then want to make sure they can get in, precisely how you do
that depends on what else needs access to /var/www/, and what sort.


> In ProFTPd I've assigned them permissions for the /var/www directory,
> but that doesn't work. They just get a permission denied when
> changing folders in their FTP client.

This is probably because you've not turned off the feature that jails
users to their home directory. I know you turn it on with

DefaultRoot ~

I suspect commenting that line out will turn it off, but I've never run
proftpd without that so I'm not sure.

> SCP isn't an option, though I haven't had much more joy with getting
> WinSCP working either, though I'm told that's a limitation on WinSCP
> rather than SCP as a whole.

WinSCP is a bit rubbish by many accounts. Most GUI FTP clients will do
scp if you call it 'SFTP'. What is it about scp that makes it not an
option?

-- 
Avi