The users file

Users connecting to easyFTPD are checked against a users-file, which by default is located at /etc/easyftpd/users after installation. The lookup path for users is however defined in the config-file, and can be changed to point anywhere.

A users configuration file simply contains rows of data in the format:

username:password:permissions:share_path

where each field is specified like:

An example users file can look like this

pub:banana:r:/home/buffi/ftp_share/pub
stabpaw:ujk3m!73cff165ea637d821f9ba5f9d11aa96333fd87d0:rw:/home/buffi/ftp_share/stabpaw

This contains two users "pub" and "stabpaw". pub's password is "banana" while stabpaw's password is "secretpassword" but saved as a salted sha-hash. Pub has read-permissions to "/home/buffi/ftp_share/pub" and stabpaw has read and write permissions to "/home/buffi/ftp_share/stabpaw".

Saving passwords as hashes

Saving passwords as plaintext is not very safe, and easyftpd allows sha-hashing to be used instead, if you want increased security. To use hashed passwords, replace the plain-text password with a salted sha-hash (in hex).

To get a password hash, simply use the script easyftpd-pwhash like this

easyftpd-pwhash "mypassword"

This will return a string with the syntax salt!hash where salt is five characters and the hash is the sha-hash of the password concatenated by the salt. Put this string in the password-field in the users-file.