wu-ftpd - symlinks

[Armand]

% Probably a dumb question.  I would like to symlink a directory under
% my
% /home/ftp/pub.  I know this is possible - lots of sites do it.  But
% wu-ftp
% doesn't recognize symlinks created by ln -s.  Is there something
% special
% I can do to get the link to work in wu-ftpd?
%
% Thanks,
% Lisa

Hi Lisa,

According to http://www.wu-ftpd.org/wu-ftpd-faq.html#QA74

"15.I made a symbolic link within the anonymous tree and it doesn't work
for the anonymous users. 

Symbolic links are relative to your active root. If you want to access
files/directories/diskspace outside your chrooted environment, you'll
have to import it using directory loopback mounts (available on at
least Solaris) or using NFS mounts (available on most other operating
systems but they have a performance impact)."

So in short, no you can't just make a soft-link with ln -s. Apparently
it requires an NFS mount which I'm not familiar with.

But according to people on irc.openprojects.net #linpeople you can use
hard links to accomplish this (be aware that you can't hard-link across
devices i.e. partitions).

Maybe this is where security problems arise when you try to link outside
of the chrooted environment.

I like wu-ftp, it automatically set up ftp to my users' public_html file
just by making an ftp-only account.

There are other ftp servers that may well be as good as if not better
but I learned a lot from digging thru the docs about wu-ftp on my 
RH box.

HTH,
Armand