SUMMARY: An odd problem with WU FTP 2.4 in SunOS 4.1.3U1B

From: Chin Fang (fangchin@jessica.stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 29 1995 - 06:37:20 CDT


I have been receiving a few responses to my problem, described briefly
below again. None of touches the heart of the cause - SunOS shared libs.

The problem occured after I installed a freshly fetched WU FTP 2.4 on
our Lab's file server. To make a relatively secured environment for guests,
I made a few chroot()'ed accounts who only have FTP privilages and their
accounts are all located in /home/guests as /home/guests/guest1... etc.

Upon testing, I immediately noticed that dir and ls wouldn't work in the
way they normally do (for dir, a ls -l list is generated for instance).

That's puzzling. After checking permissions etc without any improvement,
I fired a SOS to sun-manager :)

About a day later, I was putting something in our anonymous ftp archive.
Suddenly the key - chroot()'ed environment - surfaced in my mind.

I immediately cp -r the bin directory in the ~ftp directory to
/home/guests. The bin contains statically linked good stuff like gun tar,
compress, gzip, and essential binaries.

Afterwards, the problem I encountered disappeared immediately, as it should.

So, in conclusion, whenever one sets up a chroot'ed environment, for WU FTP,
then the new root must have a bin containing essential binaries. Otherwise,
these poor FTP users can't even see what's inside.

Regards,

Chin Fang
fangchin@jessica.stanford.edu



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:10:32 CDT