tutorial

FTP is an insecure, outdated and overall horrible protocol that you should never use yourself. Yet, sometimes you want to allow some people to upload files to your server, but you don't want them poking around your server or users demand FTP because they are used to it and have no idea what SSH/SFTP is.

Either way, following is how you "chroot" ftp users to their home folder, so they can't do any harm:

• Download latest proftpd source to /usr/local/sources and change to that folder.
• ./configure --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
• make
• make install
• Edit vi /etc/proftpd.conf:
  • Change "Umask 022" to "Umask 002" #So, files they upload are group-writable
  • Uncomment "DefaultRoot ~" # this does actual chrooting
• Make sure "/bin/false" is listed among the shells in "/etc/shells"
• Create new unix user with "-s /bin/false"
• Start proftpd daemon

More often than we'd like to acknowledge we get a need to remove Subversion .svn files in the working copy.

This will do it:

There are several books about Subversion, some small some huge. Yet, none of them gives a 5 minute get-going guide. Most of the developers are seasoned CVS users, so we do not really need a tirade about version control - just get us going!

And (I can hardly stress this enough) we\'d really like Subversion to authenticate over SSH. Leave that "pasword db" (in essence - open text file) or Apache Module bullcrap, to somebody else. Neither do we need the WebDav for version control - thank you very  much, but no.

The last time I set up a SVN repository (accidentally - my first time, too) it took me looking through 4 different books and a week\'s work on and off. Today I needed to do it, again and I found out that I did not remember much of the last experience. Well, it did not take me a week, but still more than I would want to spend on it. Anyway, to save myself time, in the future and in hopes of this being useful for folks who don\'t want to read 4 books, here is how it is done, on Unix (Windows can get lost, as far as I care):