sharing folder thru ftp

I have two users, user1 and user2. I have a domain folder domain.com under user1, thus: /home/user1/domain.com

I managed to set up a symbolic link and set up groups and permissions and all that stuff (thanks to other posts in the these forums) so that, through shell access, user2 can access domain.com via /home/user2/domain.com

But I can't seem to get it to work on ftp. Worse, I haven't a clue where to start and didnt' find anything in the knowledgebase. Is it possible to set it up so that the symbolicly linked domain.com folder shows up for user2 when they log in via ftp?

My goal is that two users (both with shell access and NDNs or whatever they're called) can each fully access a given domain, through shell, through ftp, and through whatever else.

So far, ftp is the only trouble spot I'm seeing. Unfortunately, I'm not too skilled on Unix, so I don't really know what to do next to try to make it work :(

Anybody got any suggestions? Thanks in advance. :)

Resurrecting this old one... :)

I'm having the same problem. I have a bunch of shell users and have set up symbolic links to their directories within the domain folder. In shell, they work just fine. Here's an ls -l of some example ones:

[ouzo]$ ls -l
lrwxrwxrwx 1 andyg pg115140 36 Feb 15 03:40 andyg -> /home/ravenfam/
ravenfamily.org/andyg
lrwxrwxrwx 1 andyg pg115140 40 Jan 29 07:07 brainfart -> /home/raven
fam/ravenfamily.org/brainfart

All looks great, file permissions are as wide as can be. But when I try to change directory using my FTP client (WS-FTP LE, not changed since I changed host), I get messages like:

550 andyg: no such file or directory.

I'm also having blog publishing problems which I think are the same thing (the Blogger publish agent logging in as FTP and trying to cd and failing; it works if I use the original owner's account rather than a symlinked one).

Any ideas?

Sounds to me link your client is not able to resolve symlinks. I haven't tried doing this myself, but my FTP client does have a setting for using LIST -L to resolve symlinks.


Perl / MySQL / HTML+CSS

I can only say that I have been banging my head against this for the past day as well. Same exact setup as the previous post. I am using smartFTP which does include the long listing format which doesn't seem to help. Also tried the XP command line ftp which also doesn't see using -l.

If the symlink points outside of the user's home directory, this won't work because FTP logins are chrooted by default in our system.

Now I'm beginning to feel ignorant.

I thought the one of the benefits of being able to setup ftp only users was so that that I could create these users and delegate access to my domains. So ftp user 1 has access to my domain 1 and user 2 to domain 2.

Back to the original post now - is it possible then to setup an ftp only user and give it access to domains that are subdirectories off of the main admin user?

Only by nesting one home directory inside the other. There are a few older threads on the forum that explain a few different strategies for dealing with this.

Another option might be to use scp / sftp instead of ftp.

Ok, got it now. Thanks for indulging my ignorance.

Just a note.. we actually don't allow users to have homedirs inside other users dirs anymore, because of a whole slew of permissions problems that would come up..

Instead, if you need a separate ftp user to only have access to a certain sub-directory of a website, you can just our "remap sub-dir" feature on the web panel (under "Domains").

Then you can set http://www.domain.com/otherdir/ to be served off of something like
/home/user2/otherdir/

instead of the regular /home/user/domain.com/otherdir/

And I think that's the thing most people want to do anyway when they're trying to share directories between ftp users. You can always just add another full domain or sub-domain to point to a folder in the user2 home directory as well.

josh!

That would work if I just wanted user1 to have access to /home/biguser/domain.com/user1, but what if I want them to have access to more than one subdir? In our case, they need access to both /home/biguser/domain.com/user1 and /home/biguser/domain.com/cgi-bin. How would I work that?

you could also remap cgi-bin to their homedir.. assuming you don't want biguser to have access to cgi-bin. The problem with that though is that if the domain is tied to biguser, the CGI will run as them (although you can change the user cgi runs as from the "Domain > Web" area.. "edit" link) and so the files must be owned by them, and the directory the files are in as well (and chmoded 755).
But if all your cgis are going to be in that dir, and you only need user2 to have access to them, you can remap that subdir as well and then change the user your cgi runs as to user2 and that should work I think!

josh!

...if I only want user2 to have access, aye. Alas, I have about six users, and they all need access to cgi-bin: it's got various individual's search scripts, etc.

I've got the structure:

domain.comcgi-bin
domain.comuser1
...
domain.comuser6

And ideally I want:

biguser to have access to everything from domain.com down
user1 to have access to domain.comuser1 and domain.comcgi-bin
...
user6 to have access to domain.comuser6 and domain.comcgi-bin

...and while this works a treat using symlinks and a shell account, not all of my users are shell-savvy and all will, at various times, require the use of FTP.