Mounting Network Drive(s)

[Jeff Vian]

Jwp wrote:

> Hehe, little to fast on the draw there sorry about that.
>
> I run a small FTP server for friends and family through my Linux box, 
> and due to Hard Disk space limitations I store the files on a windows 
> machine with a much larger HDD. Now in order to allow each user access 
> I have mounted the shared windows drive (XPSHARE) into each FTP user’s 
> Home Dir.
>
> Is this a bad practice? If so is there another way to provide users 
> access to the network drive, while keeping them in CHROOT jail? I 
> tried mounting the network drive to an external mount point and then 
> mapping this folder to the user home dirs (but obviously that didn’t 
> work, understand I am new to linux).
>
Your approach seems to me to be reasonable.
There are a few considerations.
1) Are you allowing them to write to the ftp server? If so you might 
still have a space problem develop.
2) Does the chroot jail work when mounting the shared drive for each 
user? If so then you should be ok

Mounting the drive to a mount point may work, but by default ftp is not 
allowed to follow sym links. Thus your problem in mapping it to users 
home directories.

One easy way, if these users all are using only the ftp shared 
directory, would be to mount it, as you already have said.
Then for each user, make that directory their home directory, and make 
each user a member of the same group. Give the group appropriate 
permissions for that directory.

Another approach might be to have them all use the same username for 
ftp, and for that user do the above.


> Thanks for your time,
>
> JP
>