Ali Aboosaidi Umm… Unorthodox?

Linux: vsftpd and symbolic links

vsftpd is all about security, and that’s why you cannot access linked directories through vsftpd with any ftp client. My arguement is that if you know how to use symlinks, or are careful enough not to link directories you don’t want to share then who’s vsftpd to butt in and completely disallow you to use such convenient feature of an OS? Reminds me of Windows Server type security… they block IE by default so that you have to either allow every single site, or disable IE ESC altogether.

Here is my convenient workaround: use mount bind!

mount --bind /sourcedirectory /destinationdirectory

You can either use @reboot cron job to have the directories mounted, or mount though fstab by adding the following line:

/directory-you-want-to-mount /destination-directory none bind

Haa… gotcha, but don’t go too fast! This is mount, not ln and will NOT create a mount point in your destination directory. For instance, if you want to mount /home/share to /home/user/share you will need to create /home/user/share first, then mount. Also keep in mind that if you have a copy or rsync job to copy contents of /home/share AND /home/user recursively, you will create two full copies of /home/share directory. One in /home/share and one in /home/user/share. Exclude one of the directories from your cp or rsync job.

Related posts:

1. Linux: Mount remote Windows shares with smbfs
2. Linux: A simple and quick way of sharing a folder with Windows systems using Samba
3. Linux: Copy files between Linux Servers with scp
4. Linux: User management
5. Debian: ssh authentication key instead of password – RSA key pairs