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George
Asked: 2010-03-09 10:20:07 +0800 CST

Limit ftp users to only certain directories in Ubuntu

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There are several questions around limiting ftp users to certain directories. However, most of them refer to vsftpd, which I don't think I have installed on my system. I'm running Ubuntu 9.04. How can I tell what ftp service I have installed, and then limit certain users to only the /home/ftpuser directory instead of having full access to the file system?

I think I can add them to a separate group and give that group access to the proper directories, but then do I have to remove that groups permissions from all other directories? It seems like there should be an easy way like setting the chroot_local_user value in the /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf file, but that doesn't exist on my system.

Update

Here are the results of: dpkg --list |grep -i ftp:

ii curl 7.18.2-8ubuntu4.1 Get a file from an HTTP, HTTPS or FTP server

I can connect to this servier using sftp but there are no ftp servers installed. Do I have to install one?

ftp ubuntu permissions file-permissions

2 Answers

  1. I'd recommend using proftpd with Ubuntu.... I follwed these steps recently and it worked ver y well....

    Here's quick install steps: 

    sudo apt-get install proftpd

# Add this line in /etc/shells file (sudo gedit /etc/shells to open the file)
/bin/false

cd /home
sudo mkdir FTP-shared
sudo useradd userftp -p your_password -d /home/FTP-shared -s /bin/false
sudo passwd userftp
cd /home
sudo chmod 755 FTP-shared

and edit your proftpd.conf file like that if it fit to your need 

sudo gedit /etc/proftpd.conf
or
sudo gedit /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf

sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd start

    These steps are from this very helpful thread on ubuntuforums.org

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  2. dpkg --list |grep -i ftp

    should show you the list of packages on your machine that include 'ftp' in the name. If there's not one, then you may not have any kind of FTP server installed.

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