FTP Users

[RavenSensei]

We have a need for our Marketing dept to be able to ftp files up and down from our 8.04 ubuntu server. All of our directories are live on the web.

I would like to create a user that will allow it access to a directory within /var/www. We have 3 sites, and I'd like to create a different user for each site that only allows them access to that specific site. It'll allow us to track who is doing what out there.

I don't know anything about groups or why /var/www exists as the bane of my existence, but for some reason, every user I create and try to push a file to /var/www/site1, it tells me it can't (553 Could not create file)

Any ideas? I think I need to create a group that has access to those dirs and then put the people in it, but I don't know how.

[lemming465]

FTP is pretty much only good for intranet use and anonymous downloads. For uploads I'd strongly recommend using SSH file copies ("scp") instead.

/var/www is simply the default document root for Apache httpd. If you don't like having your web documents there, change it. See e.g. /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.

The "could not create file" error would be a group permissions problem; you are going to have to learn about groups, alas.

Assuming you have users fred, joe, and mary, the kind of thing you need is along the lines of:

sudo -i
groupadd marketing
mkdir -p /var/www/upload/marketing
chgrp marketing /var/www/upload/marketing
chmod 2775 /var/www/upload/marketing
for muser in fred joe mary; do
usermod -G marketing -a $muser
done