Hi guys,

by doing a mistake and choosing 32kb instead of 256kb block size on Friday night, I’ve redone the operation this morning and made a video out of it.

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Hi guys,

so – today – FINALLY – my new Mac Pro arrived. I’ve VERY satisfied with that machine. I’ve just put in the 12GB of RAM and my 4x 1TB HDDs to create a RAID10 out of it. Voilá! Works like a charme.

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Hi guys,

I couldn’t find a good tutorial to install the FTP server proftpd on Debian, so I mixed it from different tutorials. Here’s what I’ve done.

What I expect from the FTP server is, that the user(s) could log in and have access to different folders who are shared from another harddisk. When I began the tutorial, I thought, that the proftpd is not the solution for my needs, but in the end, it’s the perfect one.

Let me show how what I need:
- the files are stored on a seperate (1TB) harddisk
- the user should be able to access those files without having to leave their own home directory
- the user should NOT see ALL of the folders from the sperate disk

First, the installation of the package was needed. Pretty easy with Debian of course
# apt-get install proftpd

This package has a lot dependencies, so don’t be surprised if up to 20 additional packages will be installed. You will be asked, if you want to install it as inetd or daemon process. Daemon is the better choice for 24/7 FTP servers.

Next, you’ve to configure the server. This is my configuration file, mixed from different tutorials:
Include /etc/proftpd/modules.conf
ServerName "Trip"
ServerType standalone
Defaultserver on
Port 21
Umask 022
MaxInstances 30
User nobody
Group nogroup
DefaultRoot ~
AllowOverwrite on
AuthUserFile /etc/proftpd/ftpd.passwd
AuthUserFile /etc/proftps/ftpd.group
UseIPv6 off
IdentLookups off
ServerIdent on "FTP Server ready."

DenyGroup !ftpuser !ftpprouser


RootLogin off
RequireValidShell on

UseReverseDNS off

When you’ve copy&pasted this (and modified the servers name), you should restart the server with an easy
# /etc/init.d/proftpd restart

Ok – the server is running fine now, and next, you will have to modify your user(s) to be able to access the FTP server with their account settings (which are the same as the SSH logins).

First of all, you will need to add a group. I call it ftpuser:
# addgroup ftpuser

Ok. So next, add the users to this group.

IMPORTANT! I’ve another group where the users are assigned to, so I had to use a CAPITAL “G” to add then to both groups.

# usermod -g ftpuser username

Repeat this for all users who should have access to your brand new server.

If you want to add new user, do it that way:
# adduser -g ftpuser username

Here are two commands, where I am honestly not 100% sure for what they are, but you need them.
# cp /bin/false /bin/ftp
# echo "/bin/ftp" >> /etc/shells

The next think you’ll have to do is to set up the directories. I prefer to use the mount –bind and not ln -l. So here’s what I’ve done.

# cd /home/username
# mkdir Directory
# mount --bind /home/username/Directory /media/1tb_a/Directory

I’ve mounted my 1st 1TB disk in my server in 1tb_a while the backup drive (same, energy saving “green” WD 1TB disk) is 1tb_b. So, of course it will differ from your setup.

I’ve, as mentioned before, 2 groups parallel for my users. The first, main group is klein2. I use this for Samba access. The new one is the ftpuser. I’ve added the new user, who will be able to access our local server, so this one is now also in the group klein2. Why? Well, the user should have access to all folders.

The rights look like this:
52707329 4 drwxrwx--- 2 root klein2 4096 2009-01-01 23:54 Directory

Note, that the ls -lisa will NOT show the 2nd group ftpuser, but the main group.

The rights were set with:
# chmod -R 2770 Directory

Of course, the groups should be set with:
# chown -R root.klein2 Directory

Mount other directories as shown above manual or – if you don’t want to repeat those steps whenever you’ve reset your server – add those lines into /etc/fstab:
# nano /etc/fstab
/media/1tb_a/Directory /home/username/Directory none bind 0 0

Repeat this for EVERY directory you’ve mounted.

See what’s the good thing here? YES! You can select the folders you like to share for different users. You don’t have to share all folders to everyone etc.. I like this

Ciao
Dennis

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