Ubuntu – FTP Server on Ubuntu

ftp

I'm looking for an FTP server application for my headless server, which is a public virtual machine with a public ip address. . I've narrowed it down to 3, at least from what I've read are the most adept.

vsftpd
proftpd
pure-ftp

I've been researching all 3 but my primary concern is that I need one account that can upload but not see the contents of the folder/directories once it is logged in.

We had been using filezilla server on a Windows server but we've had to move to Ubuntu. I've not installed any of these applications before and I was wondering if any of them support this on Ubuntu. If they do, how would I go about setting that up?

Best Answer

I'm using vsftpd on an internal server, so I can only answer for that one…

vsftpd has basically two parameters to control the directory listing in its /etc/vsftpd.conf

dirlist_enable
    If set to NO, all directory list commands will give permission denied.

    Default: YES

dirmessage_enable
    If enabled, users of the FTP server can be shown messages when they 
    first enter a new directory. By default, a directory is scanned for
    the file .message, but that may be overridden with the configuration 
    setting message_file.

    Default: NO (but the sample config file enables it) 

download_enable
    If set to NO, all download requests will give permission denied.

    Default: YES

So in your case, you should definitely add:

dirlist_enable=NO

as a minimum and depending on your use-case, also disable downloads and dirmessages. (and that's why I added the download_enable parameter, which doesn't really control any directory listings)

Source: man vsftpd.conf

Having said all that, on a public server, I wouldn't allow standard ftp to run any more, but would use something like sftp.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Basic Ubuntu FTP Server

I'm going to recommend PureFTPD because it's been the simplest and easiest to use in my opinion. You'll need to install it first: sudo apt-get install pure-ftpd once it's installed it'll start itself up. By default it uses PAM Authentications - meaning it uses the accounts which already exist on the system for it's auth. All you'll need to do is create a user account with the home directory being your www path and set the password for that account. You should then be able to connect with that user/pass combination to upload/download files.

Something like this:

sudo adduser ftpman --home /var/www/ --ingroup www-data

Which will create the ftpman user and put him in the www-data group which Apache uses and will walk you through the rest of the setup script. Once that's defined make sure to chmod the WWW folder if you get errors about it already existing to the user/group combination you created.

Lastly if you want to lock down SSH access for that account run: sudo chsh -s /bin/false ftpman which will change that users shell to false. (Replace ftpman with your ftp user)

Ubuntu – FTP/SFTP not allowing any writing

You should be able to change the permissions (by terminal on the machine or over SSH) by running this so that users other than root can access it:

sudo chmod -R 757 /var/www

or this so that it is owned by your user (which should be defined by $USER):

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www

You need to do this as only the owner+group can read, write and execute in /var/www, but other users can only read and execute - including the user you are using to try and the folders.

For more info, look at man chmod and man chown

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Basic Ubuntu FTP Server

Ubuntu – FTP/SFTP not allowing any writing

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