Hi I was wondering how I can restrict a user from leaving his/her home dir? What do I do so they cant start wandering around my files?

THanx Nephlite

I am surprised you even got the thing working. It has never worked for me. Ahh the day i dont have to pay $300 for tech support per incident. The Easiest way to do it is to change the permissions of the Folders. Make sure "Others" are set blank accross the screen and make sure you move your Main FTP folder at least 3 levels from the Root or "/" of the system.

An even easier way is to add the following line to proftpd.conf

DefaultRoot ~

I have done that before and i still got past the security of default root. Chmod is a ftp administrators worst fear.

How did you get past that? I've had that line in my proftpd for a long time. And I've tried getting to a lower level then the users home directory but it just wasn't possible. If you have a way in which you can get around the DefaultRoot besides the fact that you might have configured it wrong, then you might want to send it as a security alert to the maintainers of proftpd. My guess is that you configured something wrong because it really does work.

Possibly Mik. But out of cusiosity how do you maintain users?

mine delete. i think pam-ela hates me.

Just create normal users using the 'useradd' command. To remove a user you can use 'userdel'. To set the users password just run 'passwd username'. You will have to do all that as root.
Each user you create will by default get a directory /home/username as their home directory. Setting the line 'DefaultRoot ~' in your proftpd.conf file will make sure they can only access files in that directory and won't be able to see anything else on the filesystem. If you want one of the users to be able to see everything then you could change it to something like:

DefaultRoot ~ !specialuser

I'm sure a lot of these are all answered in the proftpd faq and the documentation on their site.