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User and Group FAQ

1999/12/12 by Crescent


Q: Login always fails with the message: 530 You are not allowed to log in from this Ident@IP. How can I turn this off ?
A: Every user has IP ranges where he is allowed to log in from. To allow a user to log in from any IP, give him the universal IP range *.*.*.*, e.g. with the command: SITE USER CHANGE username IP0=*.*.*.*.

Q: How do I set a new password and what can I use as password ?
A: You can set your password using the SITE PASSWD command. As normal user you can only set your password, as superuser and siteop you can set the password for any user, and as groupop you can set the password for all users of your primary group. You can use any type of password you can use as shell password - normaly an alphanumeric string which may additionaly contain a few special characters. (do a man passwd on your unix shell).
When changing the password using the SITE PASSWD you may experience problems if your ftp client filters or processes such special characters. Then try changing it using another ftp client or if you are experienced with the FTP protocol you may want to login using telnet and change it then.
FTP4ALL uses the DES encryption routine to hash your passwords, meaning that a zero-string (a 56 bit string containing only zeros) is encrypted with your password. Then if you enter your password this encrypted string is decrypted with your password, and if the cleartext is again a zero string your password was correct.
Plans are to implement better hash routine for FTP4ALL, which makes it more secure and working the same way on all unix systems (MD5 or SHA-1).

Q: What is a siteop allowed to do ? What is a groupop for ? What rights can you grant to siteops/groupops ?
A: See the documentation of new features in v3 for more details on siteops and groupops.

Q: What's with these weird ratios ? limits ?
A: For historical reasons, and also for maximum configurability, FTP4ALL represents limits as a percentage, rather than as a ratio. That is, if you want a user to have a 1:3 ratio (they need to upload one megabyte to download 3 megabytess) then they have to upload 33% of whatever they want to download, so their limit is 33. If you want a user to get twice as many megabytess downloads for whatever they upload, their limit should be 50. If you want them to be on a 1:5 ratio, set the limit to 20. See, it's simple. You can also compute it using a simple formula: If the ratio is a:b then the limit is (a * 100) / b. Example: Ratio 2:3 will become (2 * 100) / 3 = 66.

Q: What's this stuff I see about templates ?
A: Templates simply provide a simple way for you to add users to your system. Any user can be used as a template, and by doing "site user add <newuser> <existinguser>" it is possible to create a new user that will inherit all of the characteristics of the old user. Also, users can be explicitly set to be template users - see SITE USER for further information.

Q: By default a user can delete files he has uploaded. How can I turn this off ?
A: SITE REG SET umaskuser 0x3F1313
This will take away the overwrite/delete permission. It will apply for new sessions only. See umaskanon for more details on the flags.

Q: How do I set up multiple logins from more than one IP (mp3/mp3 style logins) ?
A: There are two possibilities. The first is to create a user and set the number of logins to the desired value (e.g. SITE USER CHANGE mp3 logins=20). The second one is to create an anonymous user, givce him a password (e.g. SITE PASSWD mp3 mp3) and set the number of logins in the config file limits.cfg. I recommend the second way, because you have more control, e.g. you can restrict the number of sessions from the same IP adress, to prevent one user from taking all available sessions.

Q: I did a SITE GROUP ADD friends 5
and then a SITE CHOWN someuser:friends /uploads.
The second command failed giving a "unknown group" error. What is the problem ?

A: The problem is that the new group is not available immediately, it is available to new sessions. Either do a SITE CHOWN someuser:5 /uploads or quit your session and log in again.