FTP and tcsh don't mix

[W. Phillip Moore]

In article <ramsey.657905203 at sundance> ramsey at sundance.llnl.gov (Susanne Ramsey) writes:

   I have a sun 4/330 which I just upgraded to SUNOS 4.1.  As we have been de-
   bugging we have found that a person who has tcsh as a default shell can not
   FTP to that account.  Any other shell seems to work just fine..  We have the
   latest version of tcsh ( i think 8-))  

   Anyone seen this before..???

Yes, as a matter of fact.  Most of our users usr /bin/csh, but myself and a
few others use /usr/local/bin/bash.  We had the same problem.  The solution
was to create the file /etc/shells and list all the possible shells which
were acceptable on our system.  If you use /bin/sh, or /bin/csh, and this
file doesn't exist (and the others conditions for allwing ftp are met) then
ftp is possible.  From the Sun OS 4.0.3 man page for ftpd:

     ftpd authenticates users according to three rules.

     o    The user name  must  be  in  the  password  data  base,
          /etc/passwd,  and  not  have  a null password.  In this
          case a password must be provided by the  client  before
          any file operations may be performed.

     o    If the file /etc/ftpusers exists, the  user  name  must
          not appear in that file.

     o    The  user  must  have  a  standard  shell  returned  by
          getusershell(3).

     o    If the user name is anonymous or ftp, an anonymous  FTP
          account  must  be  present  in  the password file (user
          ftp).  In this case the user is allowed to  log  in  by
          specifying any password (by convention this is given as
          the client host's name).

Then go check out getusershell(3) and you'll see the reference to
/etc/shells, for which there is no shells(5) man page 8-(.  The format is
trivial.  Our looks like:

/bin/sh
/bin/csh
/usr/local/bin/bash
/usr/local/bin/tcsh

Hope this solves the problem for you.

W. Phillip Moore					   Phone: 06-908-1431
LSI Research Group					     FAX: 06-906-7251
Semiconductor Research Laboratory		  E-mail: moore at mew.mei.co.jp
       Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd.	1048 Kadoma, Osaka 571, Japan