How To Set Up VSFTPD virtual users ( Berkeley DB + PAM )

vsftpd is a GPL licensed FTP server for UNIX systems, including Linux and FreeBSD. It is secure, stable and extremely fast.

vsftpd will handle:

• Virtual IP configurations
• Virtual users
• Standalone or inetd operation
• Powerful per-user configurability
• Bandwidth throttling
• Per-source-IP configurability
• Per-source-IP limits
• IPv6
• Encryption support through SSL integration
• etc...

If you are hosting several web sites, for security reasons, you may want the webmasters to access their own files only.  This article describes how you can install and configure vsftpd to work with virtual users.

A virtual user is a user login which does not exist as a real login on the system in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow file. Virtual users can therefore be more secure than real users, because a compromised account can only use the FTP server but cannot login to system to use other services such as ssh, telnet or smtp.