Greetings all

My current objective is to setup a local repository server for internal use within our organization. I wanted to host on a CentOS 7 server using vsftpd. So far, I've been able to get anonymous logins to work, and so long as I store all of the packages in the default directory - /var/ftp/pub - everything works fine.

I've seen some information on the internet about using a bind mount in lieu of a symlink for when you want to store the packages in a different directory, and while I'm not too familiar with bind mounts in principle, I decided to give them a shot in practice to see what would happen. So I created a test directory /repos with permissions 444 and user/group is root:root; again, this is only a test so don't judge too harshly. After placing all of the packages in this directory, I ran createrepo and everything went swimmingly. Next I did a bind mount of /repos to /var/ftp and when I attempted to access the server with anonymous, I could do so but I couldn't see anything. I have to imagine this is a permissions issue, but I can't figure out what. SELinux is running, but I don't see anything odd with any of the booleans.

So not only do I have to ask what I'm doing wrong, but is it better to host a local repository server with HTTP(S) than FTP? First time doing this so I'm curious.

Thank you in advance.

I apologise, but I was able to figure this out.

I'm unsure which one was the smoking gun, but I changed the permissions of the FTP root directory to 755 and changed the SELinux context to public_content_t and this seems to have resolved the matter.

Most likely it's the permissions.
If you want (sub)directories to be searchable using ftp (or http) protocl, you need to set the execute bit on (that is 755).

Regards

Taking my experience with setting this up, I've created a tutorial on my website that illustrates in detail how I accomplished this. Hopefully, people who see this post will find it helpful.

https://gregfmartin.com/2018/04/12/r...sitory-server/