:: TheOneAndTheOnly.com – Andrew Buckman ::

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.

change to superuser
To get things running you’ll need to switch to your superuser account.
su -

download and install scponly
(check for latest version numbers / filename)
wget http://www.sublimation.org/scponly/scponly-4.1.tgz
tar zxf scponly-4.1.tgz
cd scponly-4.1/
./configure
make
make install


add scponly to your shell list
First open your shell list for editing.
pico /etc/shells
Now add the following line to the end of the file.
/usr/local/bin/scponly

That’s it, now you can grant users SSH access and assign them sftp-server as their shell. If you prefer to assign the shell via the command line, the code below should do the trick.
/usr/sbin/usermod -s /usr/local/bin/scponly {username}