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FTP application

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 11:57 am
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

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 1:41 pm
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/

;)

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 5:23 pm
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?

Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2006 2:35 am
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