I should probably know this info but I seem to be having a brain-fade day today.

When a new hosting customer is created their ID and PW are added to the .htpasswd and a new group is created for them and added to the group file.

Question 1: Are these the files that are used to authenticate the customer when they are using FTP or is there some other file (ie: a .ftppasswd) somewhere?

Question 2: If a customer has a .htpasswd file in their /home/user directory, is that file ever used or does Linux always refer to the server wide .htpasswd file?

Thanks in advance.

Hello,

As far as I know, .htpasswd is only use by Apache to protect directories. It's part of the basic authentication.

FTP and other servers (at least on linux boxes) use /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow via PAM.

Frank

HI!
Frank is correct here.
The user info is stored in
/etc/password
The user passwords in most modern Linux/Unix systems are stored in /etc/shadow
The group info is stored in
/etc/group

The htpassword is for apache. It is also used by Frontpage. It is generally used for password protection, apache handlers etc....

Have a great day :)

regards
Amar

You are talking about CPanel aren't you?

AFAIK, CPanel pulls the user data from /etc/shadow .

Ahmad,

No, I am referring to pure Redhat Linux and Apache WebServer.

Amar and Frank,
Thanks for refreshing my memory. I thought that there was some other place that Linux kept the PW info.

Chuck Roy
Roy Services
http://royservices.com