HOW-TO: SFTP on Plesk 7.5 Reloaded for Linux
As I’m transitioning from the current Ensim 3.1 server to a new server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3ES with Plesk 7.5 Reloaded, one very major issue came up. I refuse to use plain FTP for file transfers, always using SFTP, yet it wasn’t working on the new server. Not cool. Turns out you need SSH enabled on the account thereby granting the user shell access. Now I need multiple SFTP accounts, but I have no desire for them all to have shell access as well. After a bit of research I came across scponly which acts like a shell, yet restricts the user to using it only for SFTP/SCP, no command prompt at all. Plesk conveniently has a selection box for you to choose a shell when granting SSH access to user accounts, so after getting scponly installed, it’s now a piece of cake to grant SFTP/SCP access without giving shell accounts. Instructions after the jump for anyone looking to do the same.
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