Problem scenario
You want to use a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server to be an FTP server. You have a RHEL instance in AWS. How do you configure this server to serve as an FTP server?
Solution
1. Run this command: sudo yum -y install vsftpd
2. Run the commands below but replace contint with the username of your choice. You will need to respond to a password prompt too.
sudo adduser contint
sudo passwd contint # give this user a password and remember it
sudo mkdir /home/contint/ftp
sudo chmod a-w /home/contint/ftp
sudo mkdir /home/contint/ftp/files
sudo chown contint:contint /home/contint/ftp/files
echo "file to test vsftpd" | sudo tee /home/contint/ftp/files/basic.txt
3. Edit the /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf file so that
a) "chroot_local_user=YES" is not commented out. (There should be no leading "#" in front of this stanza.)
b) these lines are appended at the bottom (and then save the changes to vsftpd.conf):
user_sub_token=$USER
local_root=/home/$USER/ftp
pasv_min_port=40000
pasv_max_port=50000
4. Run these two commands (where contint is the username that was added in step #2):
echo "contint" | sudo tee -a /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.userlist
sudo systemctl restart vsftpd