I'm working on an ftp server that uses the home directory for the ftp user as the anonymous user folder. Anonymous users can't upload, but I want other users to be able to upload to that area. I added those users to the ftp group then did "chmod 770 /home/ftp" so that people in the ftp group could write to the directory. Then I made symlinks from the home directories of the users to /home/ftp.

Everything worked fine at first. I could login as those users with ssh (which was how I was doing all the work) and with ftp and I could read and write to /home/ftp with two different users. However, I logged back in later with ssh and the permissions of /home/ftp had changed back to 700. Neither user could follow the symlinks using either ssh or ftp, so the permissions were definitely changed.

If I log out and back into ssh soon after I do this, the symlink still works. I'm thinking it's time-based, to the tune of a few minutes.

The server runs Mandrake 9.2. I would appreciate any ideas.

Hi,

If you want to provide one or more real users with the same access to the file system that they would have if they logged in directly, you could redfine that user or group as real by setting a realuser or realgroup value for the user or group, respectively.(For example, add a line that reads "realuser joe".)

Hope it would be useful.

I don't think it has anything to do with ftp problems, because it's doing the same thing over ssh. I've done some tests and this problem affects every folder in /home, whether it be a home directory or not. Regardless of the folder mode, it is changed back to 700. I'm guessing it's some mandrake service running, so I'll look into that.

It turns out that it was a Mandrake problem. Drakperm was set to set the mode of all directories in /home to 700. I just added another entry that sets /home/ftp to 1770.