FTP application

Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy.
This forum is not for asking programming related questions.

Moderator: General Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
wtf
Forum Contributor
Posts: 331
Joined: Thu Nov 03, 2005 5:27 pm

FTP application

Post by wtf »

Greets,

I need some ideas if you would. Here's the question.

I need to build file managment application for multiple users etc. Tricky part is the following. Once the account is created, user will have option to upload/ftp file via browser or via FTP client. Here's the tricky part, we don't want to create a system user for each ftp account. How do we allow them to use FTP client without having a system user account?

Open source app would work as well.

I hope I'm making some sense 8O
User avatar
Chris Corbyn
Breakbeat Nuttzer
Posts: 13098
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2004 7:57 am
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Post by Chris Corbyn »

Huh? That means they'd all have to run under the same userid when uploading files :?

If you don't want to create system accounts I guess you don't want to use FTP. This upload/file manager may be of interest:

http://www.solitude.dk/filethingie/

;)
User avatar
wtf
Forum Contributor
Posts: 331
Joined: Thu Nov 03, 2005 5:27 pm

Post by wtf »

Thx d11,

I don't think that filethingy will do since we do want to allow upload using any FTP client, not just browser based upload. We came across this, http://www.proftpd.org/ which is an ftp server that's not dependent on user accounts. We think this may work since for each user you can set up a config file and control access that user have. Sorta like apache's httpd. Again this is a shot in the dark but it looks it may work.

Any other ideas?
User avatar
Chris Corbyn
Breakbeat Nuttzer
Posts: 13098
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2004 7:57 am
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Post by Chris Corbyn »

wtf wrote:Thx d11,

I don't think that filethingy will do since we do want to allow upload using any FTP client, not just browser based upload. We came across this, http://www.proftpd.org/ which is an ftp server that's not dependent on user accounts. We think this may work since for each user you can set up a config file and control access that user have. Sorta like apache's httpd. Again this is a shot in the dark but it looks it may work.

Any other ideas?
I run ProFTPd on my server. It allows you to map virtual usernames to system ones but I didn't know it could work without actual system users.

The way I've always created FTP account for people I don't want to have shell access is to add /bin/slase to /etc/shells and then:

useradd -d /home/some_ftp_user -u users -s /bin/false some_ftp_user

That will alow the user to log in over FTP but obviously, not via a shell. Admittedly, I haven't read the documentation very completely :P
Post Reply