ftp problems

Paul Robinson paul at iconoplex.co.uk
Fri Nov 8 17:05:34 GMT 2002


On Nov  7, David Richards <DavidR at eurosoft-uk.com> wrote:

> Just a little off topic here! any one know of a limit for the amount of user
> account u can have on the system. 

It depends on how many UIDs you can have on the box. I know on Linux boxes I
was adminning a few years back (which had over 64k users) the limit was 64k
users (don't ask how we bodged it - it's secret). I'm not sure what type of
int is used in FreeBSD, but I seem to recall it's an unsigned long which
(gosh, it's a while since I last did C!) should give you around 4 billion
UIDs possible. However, if all you are doing is creating FTP accounts, this
is not the way to do it:-

It seems ridiculous to use up a UID just for an FTP account, and it is,
especially as you will end up having a ridiculously long /etc/passwd and
associated files which will take forever to parse, and therefore it will
take forever to log in (trust me, I've done it). So, if you're expecting
many thousands of users, use something like ProFTPd with the MySQL patch and
put your usernames, passwords, etc. into the MySQL table. Your file tree is
chown'ed to the proftpd user and group, it implements a decent chroot and
jail so users can't escape and go looking elsewhere, and logins are nice and
quick thanks to MySQL. You also have the added advantage of being able to
write adduser, rmuser and passwd web front ends in PHP in about 5 minutes.

I know it wasn't what you asked, but I hope that helps. When you realise 
that with exim and qpopper you can move mail over to that environment, you 
will slowly start wanting more and more of your sysadmin time to be spent in 
MySQL. ;-)

P.S. - your permissions are fine, I can't see what's wrong either. Sorry I 
can't be of any help there.

-- 
Paul Robinson




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