The anonymous FTP user Because most visitors to
The anonymous FTP user Because most visitors to your FTP site from the Internet will not have an individual login account to your computer, the anonymous user name is used on public FTP sites. With the anonymous user name, anyone who can reach the FTP site from the network can log in to the server and have minimal permission for its use. Typically, minimal means that an anonymous user can only copy files from (and not write files to) the FTP server and that only selected directories are even visible to the anonymous user. Here is an example of a login session from an anonymous user: $ ftp maple Connected to maple. 220 maple FTP server (Version wu-2.6.1-18) Mon Nov 26 09:21:53 EDT 2000) ready. Name (pine:mike): anonymous 331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password. Password: ********* 230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply. Remote system type is UNIX. Using binary mode to transfer files. ftp> ftp> bye 221-You have transferred 0 bytes in 0 files. 221-Total traffic for this session was 313 bytes in 0 transfers. 221-Thank you for using the FTP service on maple.trees. 221 Goodbye. After connecting to the server, I typed anonymous at the login prompt. The server says that anonymous is okay and to enter my e-mail address as the password. (The password doesn t appear; I ve used asterisks here to represent the password.) The server accepted my password as valid. If it had been invalid, I could have continued, but the server would have warned me to type a valid e-mail address next time. Because this is an illustration, I just ended the session by typing bye and I was logged off. While I was logged on to the FTP server, I had access to all files and directories that the server allowed to the anonymous user. That would probably include only a restricted area of the server s system (the /var/ftp directory, by default, on Red Hat Linux systems). There were probably restrictions on what I could change, delete, or create on the server as an anonymous user as well. One of the great advantages of anonymous FTP is that it can easily be automated. Instead of using the ftp command, users can simply type the FTP address of the server into a Web browser. Users don t even need to know that they are being logged in as an anonymous user when they visit the FTP site. The list of files and directories requested simply appears. Tip Assuming you have installed the anonftp software package and started the FTP service, anonymous users are given access to your FTP server by default. This assumes that your firewall is not blocking access to the service and that “disable = yes” was changed to disable = no in the file /etc/xinetd.d/wu-ftpd. To prevent anonymous users from accessing your FTP server, add the following line to your /etc/ftpaccess file: defaultserver private Real users The users who have valid login accounts to your computer can also access the computer via FTP. These users can have any user name that the administrator defines. To use FTP, they can simply type their user names and passwords to the FTP prompts. At that point, they will be logged in to the FTP server. Cross-Reference See Chapter 11 for information on setting up regular real user accounts.
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