[HOWTO] - Setup FTP access on your OSX machine.

[satanicpoptart]

i would make a new thread for this question but for some reason i dont have acces...

how do i make files outside of the home directory? i have two hard drives and i want to make all my music available by ftp. my music is all located on the slave drive, how can i access those files on the slaves drive via ftp?

[Ebonit]

You do this by making a symbolic link to the drives you want. a symboli link is like an alias but it cannot be seen within the mac interface but it can when you use a browser or from windows.

To make a symbolic link you have to use the terminal.

When you open terminal, the directory you are in is your home directory. that means that when you create a link to another directory/file, that link will sit in you homedir.

type:
ln -s /volumes/yourharddrivename

or... if you have used spaces in the harddirve name:
ln -s "/volumes/your hard drive name" (within perenthesis)

that's it...you have created the link and when you connect through ftp, html or windows to your home directory, you will see the disk you want as a directory.

Now, in terminal, if you give the command
ls -al
you will see all files that sit in your homedir. So you will see the link like this:

[woodstox:~] eric% ln -s /volumes/data_2
[woodstox:~] eric% ls -al
total 22
...
lrwxr-xr-x   1 eric  unknown     15 Dec  6 00:58 data_2 -> /volumes/data_2
...

(as a matter of fact you will see a lot more lines here but I only show the first three and the line that really matters)
this link will tell you that in this case data_2 links to /volumes/data_2

[coolgrafix]

Swizcore mentioned:

"7. Johnny can now access your system via any FTP protocol. But with this setup he only has access to his user directory-which should be fine for most users just wanting to share files."

But this isn't the case. Sure, Johnny will start his FTP session in his home directory, but nothing prevents him from browsing the whole bloody hard drive.

With 10.2.3 using lukemftpd, things have changed a bit. There no longer seems to be a way to trap the user in a directory with the ftpchroot method, as evidence by the meriad of posts in other threads. FYI.

[NickBurns]

Don't know if you got an answer to this already (someplace else), but the way to do that from a browser is:

ftp://username@<ftp address>

where <ftp address:> is the IP address or DN (like ftp.myftpserver.xxx or www.mydomainname.xxx>. The browser should prompt for a password in order to log in. I also think there is a way to include the password in the URL, but forget how to do it exactly.

Robert Templeton

Thanks Robert.....but no go....
Does anyone have a link to a step by step way of doing this???? Im still having problems making this happen......

Thanks again

[kuroyume]

That' s the way to do it from a browser:

ftp://username: password@ ftp_address: port/path

username, password, port, path may be excluded. No spaces (just to get around smiley problems)

Check this link:

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ftpurl.html

If you can't do it, than something is wrong with your browser ftp access, not the semantics.

[NickBurns]

Thanks again Robert....

I checked out that link, helped out alot.
I set my machine up exactly how everyone said to. Now Im gonna go to my buddys house and see if his is the same.....

Thanks again

[SouthOfHeaven]

Ok, I think I've followed every instruction. There's a slight problem however… even though I log in as "the other user" (not Admin), I can still see ALL files on my computer, not only the "other users" files. Is it because I'm trying it from my OWN Mac, logged in as Admin or what? I only want the people who logs in to see what I want them to see!!!

[gatorparrots]

What you want is called chrooting.

You will either have to fix the built-in FTP daemon or replace it altogether in order to obtain that functionality, as it is broken in 10.2.x (unless someone can confirm that it was otherwise fixed with the 10.2.3 update).

http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthr...threadid=25129
http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthr...threadid=12942
http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthr...threadid=22849