File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
FTP services run courtesy of the ftpd daemon. It allows the machine’s users to remotely access the filesystem, so that they can browse directory listings and transfer files to and from the machine. It obeys the filesystem permissions just as a login shell does.
Enabling Anonymous FTP
First, create a user named ftp, under which all anonymous FTP activity will occur. Since this account doesn’t represent an actual person, you should use the account creation method described in Section 11.2.2.
Create a home directory for ftp. (Be sure that ftp’s NetInfo directory correctly refers to this directory as its home.) The FTP server forbids an anonymous user from accessing anything on the filesystem outside of the ftp user’s home directory.
You can now populate this directory with whatever
you’d like anonymous users to be able to browse and
download. To make a typical FTP site, add a pub/
folder containing all the downloadables, as well as an introductory
blurb in a welcome.txt
file; many FTP clients
automatically look for a text file with this name upon connecting to
a site, and automatically display it if present.
For security’s
sake, consider changing the ownership of all these files and folders
to root using the chown command, and using
chmod to make them read-only for all users. This
will prevent anonymous FTP users from uploading (and perhaps
overwriting) files as well as keep the directory safe from tampering
by local users. (A /pub/incoming
directory, ...
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