Although I’ve worked with various Mac OS X FTP Server software programs, I didn’t expect the hour and a half long journey I took today trying to enable FTP access to a single folder! I spent part of my unproductive hour searching for help on how to configure Mac OS X Leopard FTP server to allow me to point to ONE specific directory for one user.
For example, John needs access via FTP to his web folder. I don’t want to provide him blanket FTP access since he might goof something up in someone else’s. On Windows, all I’d do is setup Filezilla Server and be done with it. However, doing the same using the built-in FTP server in Mac OS X Leopard server didn’t seem as simple…and I couldn’t find any instructions googling for it.
Fortunately, I did stumble across several FTP Server solutions that could be installed, among them PureFTPD Manager.
PureFTPd Manager is a simple Cocoa frontend to PureFTPd, “a free (BSD), secure, production-quality and standard-conformant FTP server based upon Troll-FTPd”, for Mac OS X...You can easily create FTP-only accounts without messing up your system accounts. Additionnaly, virtual users files can store individual quotas, ratios, bandwidth, etc. System accounts can’t do this. Thousands of virtual users can share the same system user, as long as they all have their own home directory and are restricted to it.
It worked, thank goodness and was fairly easy to setup…and I was able to direct my FTP users to specific directories. It took less than 15 minutes to get it setup after download…not so for Mac OS X Leopard Server. What did I miss? Sigh.
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To enable the built in FTP server to do what you want:In System Preferences->Sharing, click options and turn on FTPEdit/create the file:/etc/ftpchrootand put the users that you only want access to their home folder.
To enable the built in FTP server to do what you want:In System Preferences->Sharing, click options and turn on FTPEdit/create the file:/etc/ftpchrootand put the users that you only want access to their home folder.
Hello!@ Mr. RCollins: that sounds really interesting! Is there any chance that you could elaborate on how to edit/ create the ftpchroot file? It would be much appreciated!
Hello!@ Mr. RCollins: that sounds really interesting! Is there any chance that you could elaborate on how to edit/ create the ftpchroot file? It would be much appreciated!
Ok, forget PureFTPd…buy CrushFTP. It works much better.
Ok, forget PureFTPd…buy CrushFTP. It works much better.