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I have a Debian server, and I want to give several users read only access to a subtree of folders on that server. Is there a way to do this without manually changing the rights of all files and folders?

3 Answers 3

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If you really want to restrict them down as much as possible, I suggest looking at a chrooted ssh install. That way even if they did manage to break out their tree they wont be able to trawl around the underlying system.

The Debian guys have a guide available on the subject.

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rssh does exactly that. From pizzashack.org:

rssh is a restricted shell for use with OpenSSH, allowing only scp and/or sftp. It now also includes support for rdist, rsync, and cvs. For example, if you have a server which you only want to allow users to copy files off of via scp, without providing shell access, you can use rssh to do that. For a list of platforms on which rssh is known to work, see the Platform Support Page.

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the original (from openbsd) sshd can do a full chroot, quoting from sshd_config:

ChrootDirectory

         Specifies a path to chroot(2) to after authentication.  This
         path, and all its components, must be root-owned directories that
         are not writable by any other user or group.  After the chroot,
         sshd(8) changes the working directory to the user's home directo-
         ry.

         The path may contain the following tokens that are expanded at
         runtime once the connecting user has been authenticated: %% is
         replaced by a literal '%', %h is replaced by the home directory
         of the user being authenticated, and %u is replaced by the user-
         name of that user.

         The ChrootDirectory must contain the necessary files and directo-
         ries to support the user's session.  For an interactive session
         this requires at least a shell, typically sh(1), and basic /dev
         nodes such as null(4), zero(4), stdin(4), stdout(4), stderr(4),
         arandom(4) and tty(4) devices.  For file transfer sessions using
         ``sftp'', no additional configuration of the environment is nec-
         essary if the in-process sftp server is used, though sessions
         which use logging do require /dev/log inside the chroot directory
         (see sftp-server(8) for details).

         The default is not to chroot(2).

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