Anonymous FTP: vsftpd

An anonymous FTP site is essentially a special kind of user on your system with publicly accessible directories and files in its home directory. Anyone can log in to this account and access its files. Because anyone can log in to an anonymous FTP account, you must be careful to restrict a remote FTP user to only the files on that anonymous FTP directory. Normally, a user's files are interconnected to the entire file structure of your system. Normal users have write access that lets them create or delete files and directories. The anonymous FTP files and directories can be configured in such a way that the rest of the file system is hidden from them and remote users are given only read access. In ProFTPD, this is achieved through configuration directives placed in its configuration file. An older approach implemented by the vsftpd package involves having copies of certain system configuration, command, and library files placed within subdirectories of the FTP home directory. Restrictions placed on those subdirectories then control access by other users. Within the FTP home directory, you then have a publicly accessible directory that holds the files you want to make available to remote users. This directory usually has the name pub, for public.

An FTP site is made up of an FTP user account, an FTP home directory, and certain copies of system directories containing selected configuration and support files. Newer FTP daemons, such as ProFTPD, do not need the system directories and support files. Most distributions, including Red Hat, have already set up an FTP user account when you installed your system.

Note

On Red Hat, you can use the vsftpd RPM package to set up the home directory and the copies of the system directories. If you do not have access to the vsftpd package, you may have to create these system directories yourself.