Hello,

New and somewhat challenged: The issue stands before me that my overseer wants to place the vsftpd daemon into a chroot jail. That is to say, they do not trust the internal chroot process defined by vsftpd to keep attackers from accessing the Linux core.

So, has anyone tried to setup vsftpd in its own chroot jail as well as the internal chroot jails vsftpd does as part of the vsftpd.conf file?

My impression is that it is not possible. However, I am open to ideas. I have place vsftpd in a mock jail, but it fails with an error

500 ooops ...can locate ftp_username:ftp. You receive this error when you try to ftp to the server.

If anyone feels up to the challenge or has ideas please let me know.

Snowmedia 'a.k.a, Chris'

Well, I answered my own question.

The answer: You can chroot the vsftpd daemon, although it take a little tweeking.

For those who are interested, I will post the configuration of the chroot jail later today:

Here is the basic config of the jail:

/home/jail
-bin (contains: Bash, ls, strace-for trouble shooting)
-dev (contains: null and zero)
-etc (contains:Group, Localtime, nsswitch.conf,passwd,vsftpd.conf,vsftpd.banned_emails,
( shells)
-lib (contains: ld-linux.so.2,libcrypt.so.1,libc.so.6,libdl.so.2,libnss_files.so.2,libtermcap.so.2)
-sbin (contains:nologin)
-tmp (for testing)
-user
-local
-sbin(contains: vsftpd)
-share
-empty
-var
-ftp
-pub
-run (for testing, I don't believe it is necessary)
-log (contains:vsftpd.log) (potential concern here)

Can setup for anonymous only, anonymous and local, and virtual. So far, vsftpd was able to chroot local users into own home directory placed under ftp.
I hope this helps people who have a question on if vsftpd daemon can be placed in to a chroot jail. I am sure there are a few more tweaks to make it hundered percent stable, but it is a start.