Installing rssh to allow scp/sftp sessions only for user accounts is a breeze. Getting them into a chroot jail took a bit more reseach, but in the end turned out to be pretty easy.

This is on CentOS 4.6, but this technique should work almost identically for any Linux system thanks to the l2chroot script.

install rssh

found my RPM at http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rssh/ and it installed flawlessly with yum. See the rssh site for instructions for other platforms.

configure rssh

• Default configuration file is located at /etc/rssh.conf
• Default rssh binary location /usr/bin/rssh
• Default port none - (openssh 22 port used - rssh is shell with security features)

So the editing of /etc/rssh.conf is simple, and proceeded according to the nixcraft guide, but I only uncommented

allowscp
allowsftp

and set

chrootpath = /home/jail

and added a single line for per-user config, although this probably isn’t even necessary:

user=adama:112:00011:/home/jail

update: in fact it is not necessary, and though it should not hurt it could cause permissions issues (see comments). If you want all the jailed users to share the same type of abilities, then per-user config can be skipped.

create chroot jail

# mkdir /home/jail

and again the nixcraft guide is very good, but I found it much easier than they indicate (for sftp-only anyway). Copying all the required .so’s is easy with the l2chroot script, which parses ldd output for a given binary and automatically mirrors a tree containing all the mentioned files.

# wget -O l2chroot http://www.cyberciti.biz/files/lighttpd/l2chroot.txt
# chmod +x l2chroot

Open l2chroot and set BASE variable to point to chroot directory (jail) location:

BASE="/home/jail"

and then do the copy:

# l2chroot /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server
# l2chroot /usr/libexec/rssh_chroot_helper

There is no need for copying anything in /etc or /dev.

and finally create a home sweet home for our new semi-welcome guest:

# mkdir -p /home/jail/home/adama

no need to copy /etc/skel or anything because the whole point is for them not to get a shell.

setup system user account

give them a home dir inside the jail and a shell of rssh:

# /usr/sbin/useradd -d /home/jail/home/adama -s /usr/bin/rssh adama

mount other system locations

The best part is, you can give the guest access to any other node on the system with the –bind option to mount.

So if you want to give them access to /var/www/sites/special, you could mount that from inside the jail with

# mount --bind -o noexec,nosuid /var/www/sites/special /home/jail/home/adama/ext_special

for instance. The noexec,nosuid options provide a bit of extra security, and in fact ideally should be set on whatever partition the jail resides on as well.

According to the mount man page, --bind option is supported in linux kernels 2.4.0+

And to see the appropriate entry to add to fstab (to do the mount automatically after reboot), you can do

# cat /etc/mtab