Hi,

Recently i took the step to use Linux and after some reading i went for Slack. And i like it.

Now i try to set up ProFTP and i ran into a problem.

situation:

#ls /mnt/harddiskE
dir1 dir2

#ls /mnt/harddiskG
dir3 dir4

I'd like to mount all of the above to /home/ftp. Since FTP users are chrooted into this dir the only way i found to mount the above dir's into /home/ftp is by using:
# mount --bind /mnt/harddiskE /home/ftp
# mount --bind /mnt/harddiskG /home/ftp

That's nice, but it doesn't work. It seems that the latter mount supersedes the first so only dir3 and dir4 are accessible on the FTP. Only when i umount /mnt/harddiskG the first 2 dir's are accessible.

So, is there a way to mount all 4 dir's to /home/ftp ? I'd like to see:
# ls /home/ftp
dir1 dir2 dir3 dir4

Hope someone can help me out here.

tia,
Etraman

edit: typo

Did you try symlinks ?

ln -s /mnt/harddiskE /home/ftp/harddiskE
ln -s /mnt/harddiskG /home/ftp/harddiskG

Thnx for your reply.

Yes i tried symlinking but that doesnt work because the mountpoint is on an other disk ànd the FTP users are chrooted in their home directory /home/ftp.
So the symlinked dir's are visible for the FTP clients but they are not accessible.
Besides that; symlinking does not give me the desired tree structure in the FTP:

# ln -s /mnt/harddiskE /home/ftp/
# ln -s /mnt/harddiskG /home/ftp/
# ls /home/ftp
harddiskE harddiskG

ofcourse i could use
# mount --bind /mnt/harddiskE /home/ftp/pub1
# mount --bind /mnt/harddiskG /home/ftp/pub2

which gives me
# ls /home/ftp
pub1 pub2
# ls pub1
dir1 dir2
#ls pub2
dir3 dir4

But that's not what i'd like to see.

It's too bad ProFTP doesn't have an implemented Virtual Directories thingy (it really doesnt, does it?) because that would sure save me some hassle.

Isn't there anybody here who could help me out ?

Perhaps sombody could point me to an FTP server that is capable of handling complex virtual directories then ?

Thnx again.

Why not use symlinks?

mount /mnt/harddiskE
mount /mnt/harddiskG
ln -s /mnt/harddiskE/dir1 /home/ftp/pub/dir1
ln -s /mnt/harddiskE/dir2 /home/ftp/pub/dir2
ln -s /mnt/harddiskG/dir3 /home/ftp/pub/dir3
ln -s /mnt/harddiskG/dir4 /home/ftp/pub/dir4

If there's a bunch of links, you can do it with scripting. But you'll only have to create the symlinks once. They'll still be there when you unmount the hard disks. I'm afraid that other than that, you won't be able to mount two directories in the same place.



I also know that, in Windows, I've used GuildFTPd on my laptop to let people who couldn't figure out Samba download files at a lan party.

As said before, symlinking doesnt seem to work because the FTP users are chrooted in /home/ftp and the symlinks are outside this chroot. Maybe there is a way to make those symlinks accessible but i don't know how to.

By editing /etc/fstab it's possible to make the mount --bind's as permanent as symlinks are:

# cat /etc/fstab |grep bind
/mnt/harddiskE/Server/ServDown /home/ftp/pub0 none bind 0 0
/mnt/harddiskG/Server/ServDown /home/ftp/pub1 none bind 0 0
/mnt/harddiskA7/Server/ServDown /home/ftp/pub2 none bind 0 0

Allright then; i guess i'll take it for granted for now.


I've always used Serv-U on my windows box. Serv-U does a great job when it comes to virtual directories. I'm on the look-out for a linux FTP server that does the same.


Thnx for the replies !

You can make one large 'psuedo' drive from many (both IDE or SCSI or both) by using either RAID 0 or RAID linear.
Im not too sure what the difference between the two (0 and linear) is, but I would guess that your best bet is RAID 0.
If you don't have the RAID hardware, you can do software RAID (quite easily too).
Check out: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html