Pureftp is a simple and secure ftp server that supports virtual users that can be chrooted. That was I was looking for when I needed to provide some external access to my home server. However, as often, on Ubuntu things work a bit different then on other platforms and the documentation I found was only partial.
The basic installation is simple, then the documentation mention you need to create one user that can be used by all the virtual users.
# Install pure-ftpd sudo apt-get install pure-ftpd # add group for virtual users sudo groupadd ftpgroup # add ftp user for virtual user sudo useradd -g ftpgroup -d /dev/null -s /etc
Before creating any virtual users you need to change the settings. The way the settings work is that the /etc/pure-ftpd/conf contains files that specify the settings. To enable the ChrootEveryone option you need to create a file with that name with the contents "on".
# Enable ChrootEveryone option sudo echo on > /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/ChrootEveryone
What took me the longest to figure out is that the virtual users authentication is not enabled by default. To enable this you need to create a link in the auth folder to the PureDB.
# Enable the virtual user authentication sudo ln -s /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/PureDB /etc/pure-ftpd/auth/40PureDB # And restart pure-ftpd sudo /etc/init.d/pure-ftpd restart Restarting ftp server: Running: /usr/sbin/pure-ftpd -l puredb:/etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb -l pam -8 UTF-8 -O clf:/var/log/pure-ftpd/transfer.log -u 1000 -E -A -B
Make sure that the -l puredb:/etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb is present, this is the option for the virtual users authentication and the - A as this is the chroot option.
After this you can pretty much follow the standard procedures:
# Create the user dir mkdir /srv/ftp/joe # Change the owner/group to the ftp user sudo chown ftpuser:ftpgroup /srv/ftp/joe # Create user joe with home directory /srv/ftp/joe pure-pw useradd joe -u ftpuser -d /srv/ftp/joe # Write changes to the database pure-pw mkdb
After this you can login with the newly created user.
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