Re: Where does pure-ftpd store files when anonymous logs in?
On Thu, Jul 10, 2025 at 4:49 AM hw <hw@adminart.net> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2025-07-09 at 20:19 -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 09, 2025 at 23:08:05 +0200, hw wrote:
> > > where does pure-ftpd store files when anonymous logs in?
> > >
> > > Even its man page is missing in Debian.
> >
> > According to packages.debian.org, the package "pure-ftpd" depends on
> > the package "pure-ftpd-common", and the latter has all the man pages:
>
> # apt-get install pure-ftpd-common
> [...]
> pure-ftpd-common is already the newest version (1.0.50-2.1).
>
> Oh, I should have tried 'man pure-ftpd' instead of 'man pure-ftp', I
> guess.
>
> According to the man page, it would use the home directory of the user
> 'ftp'. But that user doesn't exist. A long time ago, Debian had a
> policy that packages must work out of the box, so why wasn't the user
> created? Has this policy been deprecated, or am I missing something?
Anonymous logins are not enabled by default (if I recall correctly).
See the PureFTP FAQ at </usr/share/doc/pure-ftpd/FAQ.gz>. From the
FAQ:
<SNIP>
* Anonymous FTP with virtual users.
-> I successfully created a virtual user called 'ftp' or 'anonymous', but
anonymous FTP doesn't work.
Pure-FTPd never fetch any info from the virtual users backends (puredb,
MySQL, LDAP, etc) for anonymous sessions. There are three reasons not to do
so: - Speed: do we need to query a database just to get the anonymous
user's home directory? We don't need to retrieve any password for anonymous
sessions.
- Consistency: with the virtual hosting mechanism.
To run an anonymous FTP server you must have a *system* account called
'ftp'. Don't give it any valid shell, just a home directory. That home
directory is the anonymous area.
</SNIP>
Jeff
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