Subject: User home directory and the virtual ftp feature

From: Chin Fang <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Mar 1996 12:55:19 -0800 (PST)

To reduce system load and to keep system security level higher, our
web servers don't grant user shell level access.  This creates an
interesting problem.  The user home directories are their respective
document_root for the HTTPD; now, if each account's virtual ftp server
is rooted at the account's home directory, obviously even an anonymous
ftp user can look around in the entire directory tree rooted under
this user home directory. This defeats the purpose of placing password
access control files in such directories as even the web server will
prevent unauthorized accesses, the virtual ftp server mechanism, as
far as I can tell, doen't have such capability. This creates a sysadmin
problem as kludges have to be used to separate user's stuff for ftp 
and for web at different places.  It also complicates user file maintainence
too.

I don't have a clean solution yet and would like to invite some suggestions.

Thanks,

Chin Fang
[email-masked]