Table of Contents
FTP users can be authenticated in two ways: on a per-domain basis, or on a per-user-per-domain basis. It is possible to enable other forms of authentication too.
Basic per-domain authentication is controlled by the config/ftp-password file.
This file contains the plain-text or hashed password for the FTP user
whose username is the domain name. This user is limited to accessing
the public directory for that domain.
For example, /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/config/ftp-password contains
the password for the FTP user my-brilliant-site.com, and that user
will be limited to accessing
/srv/my-brilliant-site.com/public.
This authentication method is controlled by the config/ftp-users
file. This file contains more than just the password. Each line in
the file represents a different user, and contains the username,
password, base directory, and quota. Comments in the file start with
#.
# username:password:directory:quota bab:babs password:/path/to/base:10M
The directory and quota fields are optional. If the password field is empty, the user will not be able to log in.
In the above example, if that file was kept at
/srv/my-brilliant-site.com/config/ftp-users then the user
babs@my-brilliant-site would be able to log in with the password
babs password. She’d be limited to the accessing files and
directories below /path/to/base, and uploads to that that
directory would be prohibited if it contains more than 10 Megabytes of
data.
It is possible to use the other forms of authentication provided by Pure-FTPd. The Pure-FTPd manual gives a good run down of all the various ways to do it. Here the two most common ways have been documented.
To enable authentication for virtual users, but would rather not use the Symbiosis method, you can create a Pure FTPd authentication DB, and use that. To tell the server to authenticate against it, you can run the following commands, as root.
echo /etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb > /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/PureDB touch /etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb ln -s /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/PureDB /etc/pure-ftpd/auth/50puredb service pure-ftpd restart
Then you can use the pure-pw command to add new users. For example to add the user foo, you can run:
pure-pw useradd foo -u 1000 -g 1000 -d /path/to/home -m
It will prompt you for the password, and then rebuild the password
file /etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb automatically.
If you would like to add normal PAM authentication, then you can run the following commands as root.
echo 1 > /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/PAMAuthentication ln -s /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/PAMAuthentication /etc/pure-ftpd/auth/50pam serivce pure-ftpd restart
Normal UNIX users should be able to log in now with their standard passwords.
There are two ways of specifying a quota. The default quota for a
domain goes in config/ftp-quota. This controls the quota for the
per-domain user in public, as well as the default quota
for users specified in config/ftp-users. Its format is the same as
that for email quotas.
For the multi-user configuration file, a user’s quota can be specified in the final field, again in the same format as that used for email quotas.