anonymous ftp and /etc/passwd (was Re: WARNING!)

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <MEISSNER.91Apr10175314 at curley.osf.org>, meissner at osf.org (Michael Meissner) writes:
|> Ummm, unless you wrote your own ftpd, the standard BSD one explicitly
|> chroot's anonymous FTP requests to the logon directory of the user
|> 'ftp'.  In every system manual, where I've seen how to set up
|> anonymous FTP, it mentions this, and tells the system manager never to
|> make the logon directory be '/'.

  The system manual also tells the system manager that (quoting from the BSD
version of the manual) "The files passwd(5) and group(5) must be present [in
~ftp/etc] for the ls command to work properly."  Many system admins simply
copy their /etc/passwd file to ~ftp/etc/passwd when setting it up, rather than
doing something smart like only putting a couple entries in ~ftp/etc/passwd or
changing all the passwords in it to "*" before installing it.

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