Passing Messages - Administration

You can customize the messages displayed by proFTPD via its numerous display directives, some of which are outlined below:

# set authentication messages
AccessGrantMsg "You said the magic word!"
AccessDenyMsg "Leave and never darken my door again!"
# set connect message (before login)
DisplayConnect /usr/local/ftpd/connect.msg
# set per-directory message
DisplayFirstChdir .msg
# set login and logout messages
DisplayLogin login.msg
DisplayQuit logout.msg

Note that the files pointed to by the DisplayFirstChdir, DisplayLogin and DisplayQuit directives must all be located under the root directory space defined for the FTP user. Files located outside this space will not be processed. In the event that the server cannot find a specified file, it will display no message for the corresponding action.

You can also customize server timeouts and number of possible connections with a range of different directives. For example, the TimeoutIdle directive specifies the time the server will wait before disconnecting an idle connection, while the TimeoutLogin directive sets the time it will wait for connected clients to log in (all timeout values are specified in seconds).

# disconnect the client if idle for 2 minutes
TimeoutIdle 60

# disconnect the client if not logged in successfully for 2 minutes TimeoutLogin 60
The TimeoutNoTransfer directive sets the time the server will wait for clients which have not issued any transfer commands before disconnecting them.

# disconnect the client if 2 minutes elapse with no transfer
TimeoutNoTransfer 120

The TimeoutSession directive sets a maximum time limit for each client session - the server will disconnect the client once this duration has elapsed.

# disconnect the client after 10 minutes
TimeoutSession 600

You can limit the maximum number of connections to the server with the MaxClients directive,

# set max number of clients at any time
MaxClients 50

or apply more fine-grained rules with the MaxClientsPerHost and MaxClientsPerUser directives, which allow you to restrict connections based on source host and source user respectively.

# set max connections per client and per user
MaxClientsPerHost 5
MaxClientsPerUser 5

You can limit the number of login attempts per connection with the MaxLoginAttempts directive,

# set max number of login attempts
MaxLoginAttempts 2

and place restrictions on the size of uploaded and downloaded files with the MaxRetrieveFileSize and MaxStoreFileSize directives.

# set max file size for downloads and uploads
MaxRetrieveFileSize 10 Mb
MaxStoreFileSize 4 Mb

Finally, you can permit resumption of broken file transfers with the AllowRetrieveRestart and AllowStoreRestart directives, which tell the server that it should allow clients to restart interrupted downloads and uploads.

AllowRetrieveRestart on
AllowStoreRestart on

>>> More Site Administration Articles          >>> More By Vikram Vaswani, (c) Melonfire

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