Category: vsftpd

  • Discover the public IP address of an AWS Fargate container in a Docker entrypoint script

    tl;dr: you must use the +tcp option with dig We needed the public IP address to configure PASV_ADDRESS for a vsftpd service we’re running under AWS Fargate. Unfortunately, there’s no direct way for a Docker entrypoint script to get the current public IP address. There are some annoyingly-complicated ways using AWS api’s, etc, but the…

  • basic_vsftpd cookbook for Chef

    Recently I was rebuilding an old “virtual user” vsFTPd server, this time using Chef.  Of course I started by looking for a decent vsftpd cookbook.   There are several popular ones, for example: The vsftpd “supermarket” cookbook might be fine for some users, but it’s not been updated since 2010, and it seems to lack a good way to override…

  • Authenticating vsFTPd virtual users with pam_pwdfile.so

    For years, the standard way to set up password authentication for vsFTPd FTP server was to use PAM with the pam_userdb.so module.  It looks great on paper, but if you have tried this, you know that generating a Berkeley DB password file is a PITA, debugging is blind and brutal, and password file generation does not play well with automated deployments.…