FTP remote administration of Webcontent on OS X Server

[Essage]

I'd like to upload files to my website on a server running Mac OS X Server 10.1.5.

I want to use FTP. And the website root-directory is "/library/webserver/documents".

Is it possible to set up a user that has the webserver-directory as it's home-directory, and has only access to that, using the built-in ftp-server in os x? The ftpuser should not be able to connect to the server in any other way than ftp.

//Essage

[buc99]

I don't think you can set up a User this way.

You could set up a User and then delete all of the directories except the web directory, Desktop, and Library.

I think the easiest solution may be to set up a User for web serving only. Put all of your web pages in that User's Sites folder. Then set up the folder access to whoever you want only for file sharing.
This should keep people out, and it would be seperate from the root folders. Also tunnel ftp through ssh to upload your web pages. (This just makes the upload more secure). You may also be able to do some things from a firewall standpoint and set up Apache to use a port other than 80 for web serving. The documentation for all of this is located in OSX.

Anyone else? I'm sur there are some folks here with more secure web serving ideas than this.

Thanks.
SA

[lethe]

i believe testuser has written some nice scripts to create ftp-only users using the OSX built-in ftp server. look for his thread on ftp users, it should be what you need. if you need to modify it to suit your needs, i m sure he will be able to help.

[lethe]

here is the thread with testusers script. the only problem with this setup as i see it, is you want an unprivileged user to edit these files, and by default that directory, and its files are all owned by root. i don t think it would be too bad to just change the permissions.

testuser will probably be here soon to lay it all out for you

[buc99]

Lethe-
Will this work for webhosting? This is actually what he wants. A user account that just has webhosting capabilities>

Umm i just noticed something. /Library/webserver/documents is the root webserver folder, however, you do not want to serve your pages from here. You need to serve your pages from you Users' Sites folder. This is secure because it is not on your root directory and when you access it from ftp you will be using your User password and not your Root password. So make a user for webserving only. This way it is not an Administrative account. and serve your pages from here. You can then set up your ftp permissions to only allow access to this area of the system.

Good Luck.
SA

[Essage]

One thing that doesn't work:
When I log in via ftp, I only get the directories "Public" and "Users". I'm not in "/Library/WebServer/Documents" where I want to be.

If I log in at the computer with the ftptoweb-user, the "home-button" takes me to "/Library/WebServer/Documents", but via ftp I'm not in my home-directory when logging in.

Everything else seems to work just fine.

/Essage

[Essage]

It seems like I, for some reason, created a new Document-folder with the user admin. So the owner was root and group was admin.
I re-created the documents folder with root, so root is now the owner and admin is the group.

[localhost:~] admin% l -d /Library/WebServer/Documents:
drwxr-xr-x 15 root admin 466 Jun 24 18:44 /Library/WebServer/Documents

shouldn't it be drwxrwxr-x ?

Or has it not have anything to do with the permissions?

/Essage

[Essage]

That didn't help

I've never used NetInfo before. I don't know what I should be looking for. But I think the set up is correct. The homedirectory is the right one (/Library/WebServer/Documents).

While browsing around in NetInfo I notised the similarity with:"/ config SharePoints" and the directory I start up in when connecting via ftp. It seems like it is that directory I'm landing in when connecting via.

Documents, is a directory, and it resides on the startup disk.

Probably would a reinstall do it for me, but I´d rather not, after all configuration and installed software.

/Essage