Hi all. Almost finished my build-out of a clean, secure linode running just apache2 and mysql.

As I venture to start bringing my sites online, I am ftping configuration files back and forth as I edit them here on my machine and then load them on the server. For security sake, I have restricted the root account from having ftp access, which leads to a problem.

When I ftp in with my user, 'ftpuser' (not really, but for this example assume it as such) I am unable to overwrite or delete existing configuration files due to them being owned by root (unsurprising). Changing the owner of these files to ftpuser really defeats the purpose a little of not using root (although I suppose it is marginally better as noone will know the ftp user account name), and I can't use the su account to switch to root once conected through ftp either.

Can anyone relay their ftp strategies as it relates to my scenario?

Really appreciate all the great help guys and gals.

Paul

Short answer: research SFTP, SCP, sshfs (allows you to mount, over ssh, a remote directory tree). All three of those methods use secure, encrypted channels to transmit authentication and data. FTP does not.

-Chris

Thought this might be the answer. Thanks.

KDE's "fish" IO slave is another very handy way to manipulate files on remote machines. In fact, if you do this a lot, it's almost worth using KDE solely for this feature.

I use Konqueror as my main development environment (in its "midnight commander" format) and as ftp/sftp/fish etc client, on Gnome desktop (in Ubuntu).

Just wanted to let people know that Konqueror can be installed on top of Gnome also (be sure to install the kioslaves package to get fish, etc).

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Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar