In the last few days i have been trying to configure a Jail enviroment for users that are to connect via SFTP. The problem that i am running into is that i cannot contain these users just to their home directories.

They seem to be able to brows right out of them and into the base directory for my jail. Is there a way so that they do not have the ability to leave their home directories, and not be able to view library files or other items that can be contained in there except for the ones they add or are given pemission to access?

If this functionality is not provided by Rssh could you please point me in the direction of either A) another program that can do this or B) a retail FTP over ssh product that can do the same thing.

Thanks for your time.

If I understand what you want then you can set up the base directory of your jail the same way that I set up my /home directory.
The idea is that on the /jail directory the 'others' permission setting is zero, the group permission setting is execute only, and the owner permission is read, write, and execute. Then the owner is root and the group is users.

In my example I have the same permissions and ownership on the jailed system directories. You may need to loosen that depending on what how your applications work.

You can see that I have set the ownership of the users' home directories to the specific user as the owner and as the group. That is because I create a group for each new user. It comes in very handy when setting file permissions.

In your case you may have to have the directories owned by the root user and the ftp group. Or you may have to have the /jail directory owned by root:users but have 711 permissions. Hopefully you get the idea and you can play with it a bit.

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Thanks it worked!
I just cant figure out why i didnt think of that, i guess it was too much time working on the harder problems.

I am gratified citizen.

IMO all user home directories should be set up like this.

1 members found this post helpful.