Subject: alias directories for ftponly users

From: "Chuck Nelson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 96 11:08:57 CDT

I have a group of companies who use ftp to transfer data to and from our site
for processing. I have created a set of users and a group for them and defined
the group to WU-FTP as ftponly. Each user has his own directory with a single
"master" id who has access to each other. I would like to create a single
"public" directory for common files. Due to security reasons, I have each user
chrooted to his home. I would like to "ln" the public directory under each
user's home. I tried just using symbolic links and FTP was unable to "see" the
files. How can I set this up?

I am running WU-FTPD 2.4.2 Beta 11 on AIX 4.1.4. My current directory tree is
like the following.

                        USER1--~home
                        | | |
                  ------+ | +------PUBLIC
                  |       |
         ~home--USER2    USER3--~home
                |            |
        Link to PUBLIC   Link to PUBLIC

Any suggestions?

TIA,

Chuck Nelson
Tech. Support Analyst and System Admin.
Wichita State University
[email-masked]

---

From: "W. James Showalter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 13:13:12 -0400 (EDT)

Chuck,

You cannot do symbolic links between chroot'd directory's because from 
their perspective there is nothing beyond the root to link to.  SunOS 
4.1.X has a concept of loopback mounts to facilate this.  They are sort 
of like hard links.  Some OS's will even let you do hardlinks directly 
using ln.  I recommend you check the mail archives.  I am certain you 
will find some information which could solve your problem.

Good luck!
Jim

---

From: [email-masked] (Bill Campbell)
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 10:39:29 -0700 (PDT)

>will find some information which could solve your problem.
One thing that I do to make things appear the same to users on the system,
and to ftp users is to make some extra symlinks in the real files system.
That is, 'ln -s ~ftp/pub /pub' will make the /pub directory look the same
in either place (~ftp is the home directory of ftp for those who don't use
ksh, bash, or other reasonable shells).

This doesn't address the problems of multiple chroot ftp directories, but
the essential files for ftp (i.e. in the bin, etc, directories) can be
hard-linked together if the chroot'ed directories are all on the same file
system.  We set up a basic prototype ftp directory structure then copy it
to the destination on the same file system using:

	mkdir destination_directory
	cd prototype_directory
	find . -depth -print | cpio -pdlmv destination_directory

This will create hard links if possible, or create new files if the
hard links cannot be created.

Bill
--
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