When installed, depending on your distro and packagement manage system's post-install process, the psuedo/restricted 'shell' may need to be added to the /etc/shells or equivalent file to work as a listed shell for a user in /etc/passwd.  Another such one is called scponly.  One plus with a non-shell option is that you don't need to set up the jailed environment quite as much as you would with a shell environment (and since lack of trust is usually involved, shell access is not usually desirable, but can be a necessity depending on what the developer needs to do, etc).  

Symlinks might well not work (probably not at all as desired) in the chroot jail ("seeing outside" of the jail for the user logged in might mean broken symlink in that context, etc).  Therefore I'd move the vhost and  update the DocumentRoot to point in the new place (or move the user's home to the vhost - which of these two are more manageable as an admin is the question, and might also be impacted up partitioning constraints etc).  Note too that the user's home directory has to then be readable (at least, depending on web app needs) by apache process's user, so this is not a 'home' in the usual sense from the point of view of the outer, unjailed environment.    

Ben

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Lisa Kachold <lisakachold@obnosis.com> wrote:
Hi Mark,

No, you cannot use a nologin with scp or ssh. 

There are a few restricted shells, most notably rssh (which is in apt-get for Debian):

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-linux-unix-rssh-chroot-jail-setup.html
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/rhel-centos-linux-install-configure-rssh-shell.html


On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 8:04 AM, Mark Phillips <mark@phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:
Eric,

The Debian equivalent to /sbin/nologin appears to be /bin/false. When I tried that, I could not sftp or ssh or gain access to the machine in anyway. I am not sure if there is another Debian shell that allows sftp but not ssh.

Thanks!

Mark

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 9:54 PM, Eric Shubert <ejs@shubes.net> wrote:
That should be ok.

Be sure you have your ftp server configured such that they cannot access folders above/across their home folder. File permissions may handle this, but probably will not (many things are world readable).

Also, be sure that they cannot login to a command prompt by setting their login shell to /sbin/nologin (might vary with distro). This is commonly done for service accounts (apache, etc).


On 12/28/2011 03:38 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:
Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. Based on some constraints,
your advice, some googling, I arrived at this set-up, but I am not sure
how secure it is.

1. The web creation software (iWeb on a Mac) only supports ftp and sftp
to upload a site.
2. iWeb does not support the use of "versions" for the web pages. By
that I mean iWeb is strictly one way - create a site and publish it. It
cannot import an iWeb site, it has to start at the beginning. One can
create a site and publish it, then edit the site, and publish again, but
it cannot import or use a previous version of the site as a starting
point. (I mention this because Eric suggested using git, which sounded
like a great idea, but alas

I have this setup, but I could use some advice on how to make it more
secure....

1. User account fred
2. fred's home is /var/www/domain/fred
3. /var/www/domain/fred has owner:group fred:fred
4. Document root is /var/www/domain/fred

Thanks,

Mark

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 10:26 AM, Eric Shubert <ejs@shubes.net
<mailto:ejs@shubes.net>> wrote:

   On 12/27/2011 10:46 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:

       I need to give a user access to my web server via sftp to upload web
       site changes. What is the best way to do this? I have several other
       sites on the same server, so I want to prevent them or anyone
       else who
       gains access to their account from being able to make changes to
       those
       sites or other parts of the server.

       Thanks,

       Mark


   I use vsftp, which can be configured to allow users access only to
   their web site's tree. sftp might be able to do the same.

   Then, create their user such that their home directory is their web
   site's directory, and they cannot log in to the system (only vsftp)
   with an /etc/passwd entry like this:
   vsftpuser:x:511:511::/var/__vhosts/domain.com/docs:/sbin/__nologin
   <http://domain.com/docs:/sbin/nologin>


   Files in their web site are owned by their user, with read
   permissions for 'other' (o+r), which allows apache (or nginx) to
   read them.

   --
   -Eric 'shubes'


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