Help on vfs file creation appreciated

[mantonio1965]

Hi,

i am using ioFTPD for a several time now, but up to now i never figured out how to use different vfs files. I would like to understand how to use this feature, how they must be structured, which information is required to make them different to each other and to assign them to different requirements. I searched this forum for 'VFS' but found 0 results, which i can't seriously believe. I wonder where you guys took your knowledge about this topic from.

I am specially interested in this topic since i'm about to re-configure my site from scratch based on latest ioFTPD version and always wondered how to make e.g. the groups section show group folders only to their related members. I suppose this i achived through the use of vfs files.

Would you guys please tell me, how this works or where i can find a good explanation on it?

[Yil]

I would suggest you avoid using multiple .vfs files and instead use the hidden directory feature. There is a good chance multiple .vfs file support may be removed in some future version and it looks like the hidden directory feature is a better option for you anyway. You'll find private dirs far easier to maintain than .vfs files especially if you have lots of disks because you only have to change 1 vfs file instead of a whole pile of them whenever a change is necessary...

Check out 'site help chattr'. The +h option allows you to specify exactly who can see a particular directory. Say you have 2 groups GroupA and GroupB along with the directories DirA and DirB. You would do something like site

chattr +h "/Private/DirA" "1 =GroupA"
chattr +h "/Private/DirB" "1 =GroupB"

This would mean that the only people who could see both directories would be MV flagged users (because they see everything), 1 (SiteOps) because both permission lists explicitly include them and normal users who happen to be a member of both groups. If someone is a member of either A or B that's all they would see, and users in neither group won't see anything at all so the /Private dir would be an empty directory listing for them.

The server itself is really good about hiding dirs users don't have permission to see, however you should be careful that you configure 3rd party tools like nxtools from indexing private/hidden dirs in it's config file and exempt it from dupechecking, etc.

You may also find the list/stat -Z option useful as well (only VM flagged users can use it). This replaces the group field of the directory listing with the permission list for hidden dirs so it's easy to view who can see/access what.

Hope that helps. Besides searching this forum, I strongly suggest searching the Changelog. Every new feature I've developed has been documented there, and sometimes info on older commands/features can be found. 'Site help' on individual commands is really useful, but check out the /doc/FTP-cmds and Site-cmds files where the help text of every built in and site command is printed which sometimes makes finding things easier.

[mantonio1965]

Thanks alot for that very good reply, Yil.
I'll give it a try and will experiment around with it to understand it and will come back in case of new questsions.