UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I am running apache server 2.2.14 on ubuntu server (Lucid 10.04). Users are not allowed to login locally or remotely through SSH to the server, however I would like users to be able to sftp to the server.

I thought of using “scponly” which will give users an alternative shell, the problem is that I have 3,000 which authenticate to LDAP.

As I cannot change their shell in LDAP I wrote a script to create /etc/passwd from ldap. Now I have 3,000 user's /etc/passwd in a file, I can change their shell in the file however how do I tell sftp to read the users shell from the file?

Basically, how do configure the server, so that the Shell is read from the file and at the same time users can authenticate to LDAP to use sftp?

Any suggestion of a better way to solve the problem?
Can you help? Please.

Code:

usermod  -s /usr/local/bin/scponly [username]

This (/usr/local/bin/scponly) depends on where you already installed the scponly binaries.
In /etc/passwd the directory field is number 6.

Thanks for your response

My question is do I lists all 3,000 users in /etc/passwd considering that users authenticate to LDAP?
How do I go about solving the problem? please

Authentication is part of logging in and presenting credentials.

Who you are on the system is different. Without An entry in /etc/passwd, the user
will not have a uid, a gid, a home directory, or a default shell, for example.
Yes you need 3000 entries and any additions to /etc/group to support them.
You do not necessarily need 3000 login directories, depending on what the users are doing.

I figure it out; I modified my /etc/ldap.conf to include the following:
“nss_override_attribute_value loginShell /usr/bin/scponly”
And all 3,000 users inherited the login shell “/usr/bin/scponly” on the machine.

The next problem is how do to I chroot 3,000 sftp users
According to the scponly documentation you will need to specify each user’s home directory to chroot
Unfortunately I have 3,000 different home directories in different directory structure like:
/home/mouse/c4/worker01/usename
/home/angore/c5/worker02/usename
/home/puma/a2/worker03/username

All users authenticate to LDAP
The openssh solution involves modifying /etc/ssh/sshd_config
# Use the following line to *replace* any existing 'Subsystem' line
Subsystem sftp internal-sftp

# These lines must appear at the *end* of sshd_config
Match Group sftponly
ChrootDirectory %h
ForceCommand internal-sftp
AllowTcpForwarding no

The problem with the above is how do I specify 3,000 LDAP users “ChrootDirectory” and also make all users a member of sftponly.

How do I chroot sftp, (all users) bearing in mind that all 3,000 users have different directory structure and all authenticate to LDAP?

Can you help or suggest a way to solve the problem? Please

Could you match a particular group, maybe?