AIX Tip of the Week

Creating a ftp-only Account

Audience: All

Date: March 29, 2003

You can make a "ftp-only" account by creating a user id with the "login" and "rlogin" flags set to false:

mkuser login=false rlogin=false ftpuser

This allows the user to ftp files to the system, but restricts their ability to log on. This is useful in situations where you want to:

  1. Share files with password protection
  2. Prevent users from logging on to the system
  3. Log ftp accesses by user id

As an alternative, you can use "anonymous" ftp if you do not need to password protection. An "anonymous" id allows anyone to access files in a public directory. To create an anonymous ftp account, you can use the AIX "/usr/samples/tcpip/anon.ftp" script.


Bruce Spencer,
baspence@us.ibm.com