Temporary FTP access to directory

March 23, 2015 5.5k views
Linux Basics
dunskii
By:
dunskii

Hello all,

I’m trying to give a developer temporary ftp access to a directory.

I normally ftp via ssh, though trying to keep things simple I thought only giving them access to the theme directory regular FTP would be sufficient.

I set up the user -> adduser demo

Changed their home directory to the theme directory -> usermod -m -d /path/to/theme/directory/ demo

Setup FTP following this tutorial -> https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-vsftpd-on-ubuntu-12-04

When I try and connect via Filezilla I get the message -> Error: Connection timed out
Error: Could not connect to server

Just wondering if I’m missing anything.

Thanks in advance.
D

3 comments
  • MrTooTall March 24, 2015

    Is vsftpd started?
    service vsftpd status
    If it is not running, start it

    Is anything listening on port 21
    netstat -tulpn | grep :21

    Let me know how you make out.

  • Jambostevie March 24, 2015

    ^ exactly what I was about to ask. I suspect you may need to start your ftp service.

  • dunskii March 26, 2015

    Thanks guys, forgot to open port 21 on the firewall.

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1 Answer
dunskii March 26, 2015

Ok, now I have the port open and the user in the correct group I am getting the error “500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot()”

I’ve followed a couple of tutorials and questions and did the following
sudo chown root:root /var/www/html
sudo chmod 755 /var/www/html
sudo service vsftpd restart

I was still getting the error so try giving the temp user ownership of the directory that need work on without any luck

Thanks in advance,
D

Reply
  • MrTooTall May 9, 2015

    This is because of a security check inside vsftp.

    Add the following to your config and reload the vsftpd service.

    allow_writeable_chroot=YES
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