Right. Anonymous logins are allowed and I have created a system account 'ftp', and it still doesn't work. It keeps asking for a password when trying to log in as 'anonymous' or 'ftp'.
I have the same on Fedora, and there it does not ask for a password when trying to log in as 'anonymous', and it just works fine. This must be some kind of weird Debian issue. Why does it keep asking for a password? On Thu, 2025-07-10 at 05:23 -0400, Jeffrey Walton wrote: > On Thu, Jul 10, 2025 at 4:49 AM hw <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Wed, 2025-07-09 at 20:19 -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote: > > > On Wed, Jul 09, 2025 at 23:08:05 +0200, hw wrote: > > > > where does pure-ftpd store files when anonymous logs in? > > > > > > > > Even its man page is missing in Debian. > > > > > > According to packages.debian.org, the package "pure-ftpd" depends on > > > the package "pure-ftpd-common", and the latter has all the man pages: > > > > # apt-get install pure-ftpd-common > > [...] > > pure-ftpd-common is already the newest version (1.0.50-2.1). > > > > Oh, I should have tried 'man pure-ftpd' instead of 'man pure-ftp', I > > guess. > > > > According to the man page, it would use the home directory of the user > > 'ftp'. But that user doesn't exist. A long time ago, Debian had a > > policy that packages must work out of the box, so why wasn't the user > > created? Has this policy been deprecated, or am I missing something? > > Anonymous logins are not enabled by default (if I recall correctly). > See the PureFTP FAQ at </usr/share/doc/pure-ftpd/FAQ.gz>. From the > FAQ: > > <SNIP> > * Anonymous FTP with virtual users. > > -> I successfully created a virtual user called 'ftp' or 'anonymous', but > anonymous FTP doesn't work. > > Pure-FTPd never fetch any info from the virtual users backends (puredb, > MySQL, LDAP, etc) for anonymous sessions. There are three reasons not to do > so: - Speed: do we need to query a database just to get the anonymous > user's home directory? We don't need to retrieve any password for anonymous > sessions. > - Consistency: with the virtual hosting mechanism. > > To run an anonymous FTP server you must have a *system* account called > 'ftp'. Don't give it any valid shell, just a home directory. That home > directory is the anonymous area. > </SNIP>
