hello all:
I've just setup sftp on my Ubumtu 8.04 and now I'd like to grant access to an account with read only permissions to my USB Hard Drive. I've created and account, logged into the account which created the home directory, but when I try to access the USB Drive I cannot read or display the contents.
I'd like to setup read and file scan permissions on selected fileshare. So far the only way I was able to get access to the USB Drive was to log on to the my computer with my normal account, plug in the USB Drive which then was granted read/write permissions and then I could access it from the public internet using filezilla. When I log in using my guest account I cannot perform a directory listing, I get access denied. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here is the ls -l on the folder I'm trying to share:

drwx------ 2 mmiller root 32768 2009-04-09 15:10 SharedData

Try creating a group (say sftp), do a chown -R mmiller:sftp SharedData (to remove the silly root group with no access), a chmod +x SharedData (so everyone can list the directory contents), and a chmod -R g+r SharedData/* so everyone in the sftp group can read the data).

Then add the users for whom you wish to grant access to the sftp group.

Note: I know nothing about ftp access control, so the above is how I'd go about granting members of a specific group access to files on a directory. Unless the ftp access requires a system login, the above is probably not applicable.

First, make sure that you use the UUID in your fstab entry so that the correct filesystem is referenced.
Which filesystem does it use? If it is fat32, then you need to use the uid, gid, fmask and dmask options to determine the permissions on the drive. For a native Linux filesystem, you can use the chown & chmod commands as indicated in the last post.

If a user to gain access isn't the owner or a group member, you can use ACLs to add another user with read access. Using a group would be a better idea.