[scponly] scponly and Fedora 6

[Peter Weil]

I joined this list this morning to post a question, but was able to  
find the answer thanks to the archives. My issue was similar to that  
described in the thread "can't start sftp-server on Fedora Core 5"  
from March 2006. Previously I had done several successful scponly  
installs on Fedora 4. But no luck with Fedora 6 -- the connection  
just kept closing without explanation. Debugging and ssh logs didn't  
contain any clues. But, thanks to that March thread, I was able to do  
an "strace". The resulting sftp.log files were mostly Greek to me,  
but I did notice this line in one of them:

open("/dev/null", O_RDWR|O_LARGEFILE)   = -1 ENOENT (No such file or  
directory)

As someone else mentioned, previous installs had not required a /dev/ 
null file in the alternate root directory. Apparently scponly in  
Fedora Core 6 does.  So, paraphrasing Kaleb's post from March:

... and the answer was to create /path/to/chroot/dev/null and chmod  
it to 666.

I hope this helps save someone from a lot of frustration and time.  
And thanks to everyone who supports scponly on this list.

--
Peter Weil, Web Developer
University Communications
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Phone: 608-262-6538
Email: plweil at wisc.edu