Setting up chroot jailed FTP access on linux (especially Debian-based distros) is remarkably easy. All you’ll need is proftpd:

sudo apt-get install proftpd

Install as standalone (the default option) and once complete, make sure /bin/false is in your shells list – if not, add it:

sudo nano /etc/shells

Set up the FTP account with desired chroot:

sudo useradd <user> -p <password> -d /path/to/chroot -s /bin/false

By this point you’ll have a working FTP account but no chroot. Let’s add that now. In /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf make sure the following is uncommented:

DefaultRoot			~

Restart proftpd service and you’re good to go:

sudo service proftpd restart

Thanks to frodon of the Ubuntu Forums for his tutorial found here.

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In this second post of my lazy man’s series, I’ll explain an easy way to batch rename files in any linux distribution with the rename command. For users of the sed tool, this will look very familiar. You’ll also need a bit of knowledge of regular expressions:

rename 's/_/ /g' *.mp3

The above example replaces every underscore with a space character in all mp3’s of the current directory. The command works as follows:

rename 's/<search_term>/<replacement_text>/g' <regex_filename_match>

Thanks to jazzmusik of the Ubuntu Forums for his little tutorial found here.

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Ubuntu 10.10 was the first release of Ubuntu not to have ‘Mark Packages by Task’ working in the Synaptic Package Manager. For those who don’t know, ‘Mark Packages by Task’ is a handy little menu option that allows you to install pre-configured groups of applications very quickly – such as the Samba file server, video and audio creation suites but more importantly to us: a LAMP stack.

To get this nifty tool back where it belongs, just install the tasksel package:

sudo apt-get install tasksel

It should now be where it belongs.

Happy installations.

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