How to create additional FTP users

Avoid sharing your main credentials with friends and family when you want to share content with them using your Premium Seedbox

Updated over a week ago

Introduction

All seedboxes in RapidSeedbox support FTP one way or another. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and it's a protocol that facilitates file transfer between remote machines. As time passes by, you'll have all sorts of content on your seedbox and your collection continues to grow. There will inevitably be a time when you find yourself wanting to share some of that content with a friend, with a family member, or even a workmate who showed interest in something similar to yours!

The first instinct one might have here is to just share the FTP username and password. But two problems arise from this:

  1. These are the same username and password to control the rest of your seedbox, including SSH access. One solution here might be to give FTP a different password than the rest of the services which brings point number #2!

  2. You might not want them to see everything you have on the seedbox. Some of that stuff could be private. You only want to share a particular file or folder with them.

Prerequisites

  • You have a Premium Seedbox.

  • You are familiar with FTP and have used it at least once. You can find all the FTP info you need here!

  • You will need SSH access to your Seedbox. If you are not familiar with SSH and the Linux command line, please check this guide and this guide and come back (I'll still be here!).

  • You have your IP Address and password at hand.

  • You need to be excited about the prospect of showing a glimpse of what you do in RapidSeedBox to your friends and family.

FTPMGR to the rescue

If you have been a Premium customer with us for a while and you use the terminal every once in a while, you'd have probably noticed the collection of custom tools and scripts we provide here in RapidSeedBox. You can find examples here, here, or here. One other neat tool of ours is ftpmgr! This tool allows you to control the users you have for FTP on your seedbox.

So let's go ahead open an SSH session into your seedbox. Be reminded that the SSH user we use is called user and the SSH port is 2222. In a Linux terminal the command looks like this:

ssh -p 2222 [email protected]

Once you're in, run ftpmgr with sudo and no other parameters:

sudo ftpmgr

You should now see a screen in front of you that looks like this:

What we are interested in here is the second line, Virtual FTP users, so go ahead, press down then enter to check our virtual FTP users.

You will be asked if you want to add, change, or delete a virtual user. Hit enter on the Add FTP user accounts option.

It will ask you how many users you would like to add. For the sake of this tutorial, I'm going to choose two!

Type the number you want then hit enter.

The program will think for a couple of seconds, then present you with an account or multiple accounts and their respective passwords as shown below.

Take note of these values and write them down before dismissing the screen!

Congratulations! You now have additional FTP users for your seedbox. You can go ahead and try them out in FileZilla if you want!

But our job here is not yet done.

If you had tried them in FileZilla, you'll notice the new accounts are empty and have no files. Empty shared folders make everyone sad.


Sharing content to the new FTP user

Where exactly are the folders shared by the new FTP user?

Once you have created one or more additional FTP users, new folders is created on your Seedbox in /home/ftpuser. You will notice there's a public folder, and one for each FTP user, such as ftp1 and ftp2.

At this point, be reminded that your own files and downloads are located at /home/user by default in all Premium Seedboxes.


From here on...

Continue using the terminal, or you can connect to your Seedbox via one of the different remote control tools (X2go, ThinLinc, etc..) to move files from your personal folder to one of these shared folders.

For a quick summary to guide you in choosing where to store your content:

  • /home/user: Your personal space. Accessible by your main password. Accessible by all torrent software by default. It's where you download content and keep it for personal use.

  • /home/ftpuser/ftpX: X here is a number from 1 and above. This a directory accessible by FTP using its own username and password. Your torrent software has no access to it by default. You explicitly move content to it when you want that content to be accessible by the people who have its password.

  • /home/ftpuser/public: This is a special FTP folder created after you add any number of FTP users to your seedbox. It is accessible via FTP by any of the additional FTP users you created. You also need to explicitly move content to it.


To give a real world example of how all this could be used. You have two friends, Sam and John. Sam and John both know you have a Seedbox and they've been begging you to share some stuff with them. So you create two additional FTP users, called ftp1 and ftp2. You give ftp1 to Sam and ftp2 to John.

In your collection of files, you can think of 4 amazing movies that Sam and John would love to have. These 4 movies are Green Hero, Hot Red, Super Blue, and Sweet Pink. But then you remember that Sam doesn't like romantic movies and he'll probably not like Sweet Pink. Also John is not a fan of Hot Red and he'll come complaining the next day that you wasted his time with it. What to do?

You move Green Hero and Super Blue into the public folder, which is accessible by both. You then move Sweet Pink to ftp2 accessible only by John, and you move Hot Red to ftp1 accessible only by Sam. Both friends now have access to 3 movies based on their choice.

Everybody is happy!


Conclusion

ftpmgr is a nice little-known utility provided by RapidSeedBox to make FTP sharing even easier for everyone. It allows better control and prevents security implication problems from sharing your main password.

Apart from adding new FTP users, it also allows you to delete and change existing FTP users, in cases when you no longer want to share content with someone.

Have a great day and Happy Seedboxing!

Did this answer your question?