wu-ftpd - symlinks

[Lisa Winkler]

Armand,

I did figure this out and even tried to post to the list on Sunday about it, but of course my post never got there...  Thanks everyone for the help.

I'm thinking I will check out one of the alternate servers that have been discussed here.  A friend of mine was rooted recently (through lpr) by a particularly nasty script kiddie, so in light of the pain he experienced I'm stepping up my security as well.

On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Armand wrote:

> % 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
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