Pure-FTPd and its Anti-Warez switch
Among all the free ftp-daemons out there I like Pure-FTPd the most. It’s easy to configure and has all features that are important to me (TLS support, virtual-users support, etc.). Anyway, today it was driving me crazy. I’ve been setting up a new Debian-based linux-box in VMWare and when starting Pure-FTPd it kept telling me Unable to find the ‘ftp’ account.
Google didn’t help much or at least I didn’t find anything useful. After some trial-and-error research with the configuration switches I found out that the ‘-s’ switch was responsible for the problems. Here’s what the documentation says about it:
‘-s’: The “waReZ protection”. Don’t allow anonymous users to download files owned by “ftp” (generally, files uploaded by other anonymous users) . So that uploads have to be validated by a system administrator (chown to another user) before being available for download.
Obviously the server was looking for a system-account (ftp) that didn’t exist, which is hardly suprising as I use other accounts for ftp-ing. I didn’t find any hints on configuring the account-id Pure-FTPd expects. This anti-warez thingy being just a switch, there seems to be no solution apart from creating the ‘ftp’ account. Thus I finally disabled the anti-warez feature. Maybe someone has the same problem and finds this post useful.
Well, you are the only one I could find that had the solution. Thank you sir! I usually do the same thing on my blog if I find the solution to a problem I had that nobody else seemed to have fixed.
By definition, the anonymous ftp user is ‘ftp’. Therefore it makes no sense to try enabling the anti-warez switch if you don’t have the anonymous ftp user defined on your system.
The idea is to prevent anonymous users from abusing your ftp server – they can still upload files but as no-one can download them afterwards, there is no point!