Hi,

I have built a ubuntu server, which hosts all my media, where i have mounted my hard drives on to 3 folders (e.g. hard drive1 = moives, hard drive2 = movies2, hard drive 3 = extra files)

i want to be able to create a new user, user2, to only have access to the 'movies2' folder over ftp, but also let user1 (admin account) to have access to the same folder.

First: Do NOT use ftp - it is very insecure. Use sftp instead.

What you want to do is create a jailed sftp user. You can find tutorials all over the internet for that such as this one:
https://www.tecmint.com/restrict-sft...-using-chroot/

Even if the person you wish to access the directory has Windows rather than Linux they can access sftp logins by installing WinSCP on their Windows machine. (WinSCP can also access standard ftp as well.)

i forgot to mention that the folder, which i require user2 to have access to is located in user1 home dir

You make the jailed user2 home in the movies2 directory. If you jail him properly he'll see movies2 as if it were "/" while your user1 will still see it as /home/user1/movies2.

What we do here instead is create a separate subdirectory as the parent for jailed users (we have multiple) such as:
/home/restricted

We'd then jail the user under that in say /home/restricted/user2.

We then put links to that in any non-jailed directories we might want to share with e.g.

ln -s /home/restricted/user2 /home/user1/movies2

This allows user1 to write into it as if it were under his home directory. When user2 logs in he is really in /home/restricted/user2 but thinks he is in "/" so can't see anything really above him such as /home/restricted itself, /home or the real "/" (root) of the system. This is the point in doing the jailing.

Yes, please don't use FTP any more.

About chrooted SFTP, it is easy enough to set up provided the chroot is owned by root and not writable by anyone else. So that means doing a little differently for the chrooted users' home directories.

If you have the two users' directories set up like this:

And if you have put them both in a group, such as sftponly, and chrooted with openssh-server like this:

Then they can only connect with SFTP and even then they only see their own directories.

Symbolic links won't work if they point to outside the chroot however. You can use a bind mount instead. If your movies are in /home/movies and /home/movies2 then you can give the access to chrooted user2 like this:

Thus they will show up in the user's home directory as subdirectories "movies" and "movies2"

my folders are as follows:

/home/'user1'/movies/
/home/'user1'/movies2/'user2'
/home/'user1'extra/

Ok. Then adjust your binds accordingly. First step, though, would be to chroot SFTP for user2.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks! that worked, they can no longer see my other files but i can see theres

Appreciate the help

No problem.

One thing you might have seen in the mount manual page regarding the binds is that they won't persist across reboots unless you add them to /etc/fstab So if you have them the way you want, then add them to fstab so they'll still be there after a reboot.