Virtual FTP-servers with wu-ftpd Winfried Trümper -------------------------------- with help from Brian Grossman Version 1.2 27.01.97 1. Introduction Linux has the ability to run several "hosts" on one machine. Many people already use this to run more than 1 WWW-Service on their Linux box, e.g. www.sharpers.com (192.168.55.37) www.usurers.com (192.168.55.38) www.swindlers.com (192.168.55.39) appear as if they were 3 different hosts but in fact there is only one Linux-PC serving them. The technique behind this feature is called "multihoming" and based on the ability of Linux to assign several IP-addresses to one network-interface (ethernet-card or modem). In effect, you do not need several ethernet-cards to make Linux listen to several addresses/hostnames on the net. Linux handles the additional IP-addresses through so called "virtual interfaces" which physically represent the same hardware but are logically distinguished with their ip-addresses by the software (and the kernel). Those virtual interfaces are labeled similar than the main interface they "point" to and are simply suffixed by a (more or less) arbitrary number. The proper term for such a virutal interfaces is "ip-alias". For the virtual hosts above, the command "ifconfig" gives the (heavily edited) output: interface IP-address broadcast-address netmask ------------------------------------------------------------ eth0 192.168.55.37 192.168.55.63 255.255.255.224 eth0:0 192.168.55.38 192.168.55.63 255.255.255.224 eth0:1 192.168.55.39 192.168.55.63 255.255.255.224 eth0:2 192.168.55.40 192.168.55.63 255.255.255.224 eth0:3 192.168.55.41 192.168.55.63 255.255.255.224 ^-- no. of the ip-alias To be able to use the facility of ip-aliases you need a "module" for the Linux-kernel that can be fixated into the kernel when compiling or loaded at run-time by issuing the command (as root): insmod ipalias Most modern distributions should provide this module so I don't want to waste time in describing how to create it (hint: if it's missing, read the Linux Kernel-HOWTO). The ip-aliases for the hosts above are created with a little shell-script when booting: 8<----- cut here 8<----- #!/bin/sh NETMASK="255.255.255.224" # replace with YOUR netmask BROADCAST="192.168.55.63" # replace with YOUR broadcast-address MAIN_IF="eth0" # "main" interface IPALIASES="192.168.55.38 192.168.55.39 192.168.55.40 \ 192.168.55.41 192.168.55.42 192.168.55.43 \ 192.168.55.44 192.168.55.45 192.168.55.46" # you should not need to modify anything below i=0 for ALIAS in $IPALIASES do /sbin/ifconfig ${NETTYPE}:${i} ${ALIAS} \ broadcast ${BROADCAST} netmask ${NETMASK} /sbin/route add -host ${ALIAS} dev ${NETTYPE}:${i} i=$[$i+1] done 8<----- cut here 8<----- If you have further questions about ip-aliases, please look at the Linux "IP Alias mini-HOWTO" and the file "Documentation/aliases.txt" from the sources of the Linux-kernel (usally in the directory "/usr/src/linux"). 2. Virtual Services and Servers If a hostname belongs to an virtual interface, it is commonly called "virtual host". A daemon that runs a service on a virtual host (or a virtual interface) is called "virtual server". 2.1. Virtual WWW-Servers We already had an example for 3 virtual WWW-Servers above: www.sharpers.com, www.usurers.com, www.swindlers.com The configuration of all major http-daemons I know (e.g. the well-designed "Roxen Challenger" or the widespread "Apache") to make use of the virtual hosts is easy and already well documented. In short: just bind the www-port (no. 80) to the virtual network interface with the desired ip-address/hostname for each WWW-server you run. There is no trick. Read the Linux "Virtual Web mini-HOWTO" to get more information on this issue. 2.2. Virtual mail-addresses In the simplest case you want to recieve mail for all your virtual hosts and for the dedicated domains: www.sharpers.com, www.usurers.com, www.swindlers.com, sharpers.com, usurers.com, swindlers.com Even the configuration of "smail" or "sendmail" (the daemons that handle the mail-traffic on you Linux-box) is relativly easy: mention the additional hostnames/domains in "/etc/smail/config" (entries 'hostnames='), resp. "/etc/mail/sendmail.cw" (each hostname on a seperate line). To implement a "real" virtual domain featuring smail, please look at the smail-FAQ available from http://www.sbay.org/smail-faq.html 2.3. Virtual ftp-servers The concept of a virtual ftp-server is not supported by default for any ftp-daemon I know. What regards to the widespread used daemon "wu-ftpd", there is a patch by Brian Grossman to make the anonymous FTP-service distinguish between the virtual interfaces. Availability is mentioned in chapter 3. There seem to be no other patches around that do the same. The main idea of the Brian's multihome-patch for is to make wu-ftpd "chroot()" to HOME_DIRECTORY_OF_ftp-ACCOUNT/HOSTNAME_THE_USER_TALKS_TO/ instead of just doing a chroot() into HOME_DIRECTORY_OF_ftp-ACCOUNT/ In the example shown below, the user thats connects to "ftp.swindlers.com" via anonymous ftp is locked up under "/home/ano-ftp/ftp.swindlers.com/" instead of just under "/home/ano-ftp/". You can imagine that the basic setup is straightforward and does not differ much from setting up a single anoymous ftp-account. Kudos to Brian for this easy and efficient setup-strategy. Let me assume you would already have this special version of wu-ftpd compiled youself or fetched the binaries and let me postpone all realated questions to the end of this document. I will give you a real-world example and tell you what I did for one of my customers (I only changed the machine names to non-existant ones ...). (a) Created a directory "/home/ano-ftp" to incorporate the different anonymous ftp-servers. mkdir /home/ano-ftp && cd /home/ano-ftp mkdir ftp.sharpers.com ftp.usurers.com ftp.swindlers.com Resulting in a tree: /home/ano-ftp/ |-- ftp.sharpers.com |-- ftp.swindlers.com `-- ftp.usurers.com (b) Copied the necessary files for an anonymous ftp-service from the already configured anonymous-ftp-directory "/home/ftp" into the newly created directories cd /home/ano-ftp/ftp.sharpers.com cp -a /home/ftp/* . cd ../ftp.swindlers.com cp -a /home/ftp/* . cd ../ftp.usurers.com cp -a /home/ftp/* . Don't forget to delete the superfluous files under "pub/" afterwards (or simply don't copy them at all). For example, the "/home/ftp" the Debian-distribution provides looks like /home/ftp Permissions Owner Group Size |-- bin d--x--x--x 2 root root | |-- gzip ---x--x--x 1 root root 45121 | |-- ls ---x--x--x 1 root root 22945 | `-- tar ---------- 1 root root 77769 | |-- etc d--x--x--x 2 root root | |-- group -r--r--r-- 1 root root 18 | |-- passwd -r--r--r-- 1 root root 44 | `-- pathmsg -r--r--r-- 1 root root 172 | |-- lib d--x--x--x 2 root root | |-- ld-linux.so.1 -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 21375 | |-- libc.so.5.2.18 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 536252 | `-- libc.so.5 -> libc.so.5.2.18 | |-- pub dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root | `-- whatever | `-- welcome.msg -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 323 (c) Changed the home-directory of the anonymous ftp-account to "/home/ano-ftp" by editing the file "/etc/passwd". ftp:*:11:11:Anonymous FTP:/home/ano-ftp:/bin/sh ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ home-directory These 3 steps were the basic setup and already enabled a seperate ftp-areas for each of the 3 virtual hosts. My actual job was a little bit more complicated in that I had to enable disk-quotas (limiting the consumable disk-space per user/group) in each incoming-diretory so the story continues: (d) Enabled upload-areas in wu-ftpds config-file "/etc/ftpd/ftpaccess" 8<----- cut here 8<----- upload /home/ano-ftp/www.sharpers.de * no upload /home/ano-ftp/www.sharpers.de /incoming yes sharpers ftp 0660 nodirs upload /home/ano-ftp/www.swindlers.de * no upload /home/ano-ftp/www.swindlers.de /incoming yes swindler ftp 0660 nodirs upload /home/ano-ftp/www.usurers.de * no upload /home/ano-ftp/www.usurers.de /incoming yes usurers ftp 0660 nodirs # | | | | | # uploads allowed --+ | | | | # uploaded files should be owned by this user ---------+ | | | # dito for the group ----------------+ | | # access rights for uploaded files ---------------------+ | # creation of directories not allowed ---------------------------+ 8<----- cut here 8<----- Now, every file uploaded to those ftp-servers belongs to a seperate user for which quotas can be enabled. (e) Configured the disk-quotas Suggested readings: "/usr/doc/quotas.txt" and the Linux "Quota mini-HOWTO". * Added "usrquota=/etc/quota/ano-ftp.users" to the mount-options of the partition "/home/an-ftp" is stored on in "/etc/fstab". * Created "/etc/quota/ano-ftp.users" via the "touch"-command * Switched on quotas by issuing "quotaon" * Set quotas with "edquota swindlers", etc. Quotas for user swindlers: /dev/sdb8: blocks in use: 0, limits (soft = 0, hard = 10000) inodes in use: 1, limits (soft = 0, hard = 1000) The corresponding disk-space depends on the size of the blocks when you created the filesystem (standard is 1 block = 1 kb). 3. Availability The multihome-patch (20kb) for wu-ftpd can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.softhome.net/pub/users/brian/multihomed-wu-ftpd-2.4-23.patch Please read it to get details about the copyright. The sources for "wu-ftpd" itself are floating around in the net, use archie to find the nearest server that carries them. Change into the directory that is created when unpacking the sources and type patch < ../multihomed-wu-ftpd-2.4-23.patch to merge the patch into the sources. The FAQ for wu-ftpd is available from http://www.hvu.nl/~koos/wu-ftpd-faq.html End of the Virtual-wu-ftpd mini-HOWTO