Confused: create additional ftp user for (sub)domain

[ElricM]

First, I am *really* new to Linux. I now have a dedicated server since the traffic for my site was growing past the capacity of hosted accounts. Things that were pretty simple with hosting account control panels are now foreign to me but I'm trying to learn.

I need to know how to create additional ftp accounts that can access folders within a domain or subdomain. I'm a bit stumped (or actually pretty well stumped). I created a few users in webmin and set their properties to be the same as the domain users that Plesk created, i.e., they're in the pscln group and I've set their home directory to where I want them to be. Shell is /bin/false. None of these users can log in using ftp.

How do I add these users? I have searched through this forum but I can't find the answer. Help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

 

[defencer]

1) Is there native plesk's users able to ftp to the server? (I just want to make sure that your firewall allows you to ftp to the host)

2) Are you sure you created users correctly? Try to set up a normal shell for such user and try to login to the system with this account through ssh. Do this from local host, not from remote.

3) what exactly message you see when you can't login to the host?

 

[jamesyeeoc]

In Webmin, make sure that under where you specify the Home Directory, you do not have 'No Login Allowed". You want to either have "Pre-encrypted password" or "Normal password" and (of course) fill in the value.

 

[ElricM]

- It's set to "Pre-encrypted password "

- FTP users that Plesk creates (domain and subdomain) can ftp to the site just fine

- Ah! ok. WHen I set the shell to /bin/sh and login, I'm getting a permission denied error on the home directory (folder that I set).

I'm sorry to be this naive, but I have no permission in Plesk to access or modify the subdomain folder of the domain, even logged in as Admin. Is this normal? I would have though the Admin Plesk user would be a super user.

 

[defencer]

I'm sorry to be this naive, but I have no permission in Plesk to access or modify the subdomain folder of the domain, even logged in as Admin. Is this normal? I would have though the Admin Plesk user would be a super user

Yes it is OK, this is because file manager works under hosting FTP user credential. Even when you do this as admin. In other case your castomers will not be able to delete files, created by admin. So you need to ssh to the server as root and change owner of the firectory by command line chown.

 

[ElricM]

If you guys can put up with one more question.

the folder of say, user "bill" is under

/home/httpd/vhosts/mydomain.com/subdomains/downloads/httpdocs/hosted/bill

the subdomain "downloads" is owned by the user "dladmin". I made the folder "bill" owned by the user bill using chown. Both bill and dladmin are in the group 'pscln'. The user bill still gets a permission error when I try to log in.

This is the error:

Could not chdir to home directory /home/httpd/vhosts/mydomain.com/subdomains/downloads/httpdocs/hosted/bill: Permission denied
-sh: /home/httpd/vhosts/mydomain.com/subdomains/downloads/httpdocs/hosted/bill/.profile: Permission denied

Can someone please tell me how to fix this?

Thanks for your help

 

[ElricM]

Ok, got it working.

Thanks defencer and jamesyeeoc for the help and clues. Using webmin I found that evidently Plesk had the directory permissions pretty tight so I set them to group write access and put the ftp user in the psaserv group as well as psacln. Now it works just fine. I reset the shell to /bin/false.

Thanks again for the help. I'm happy, my independent ftp users now work and can write to their specific folders