Ssh – SFTP – couldnt read packet: connection reset py peer

Our solution is to create a main user account for each customer, such as flowershop. Each customer can create an arbitrary number of side accounts with their own passwords, such as flowershop_developer, flowershop_tester, flowershop_dba, etc. This allows them to hand out accounts without sharing their main account password, which is better for a whole bunch of reasons (for example, if they need to remove their DBA's account, they can easily do that without changing their own passwords).

Each one of these accounts is in the flowershop group, with a home folder of /home/flowershop/. SSH uses this as the chroot directory (/home/%u, as shown in the configuration in the question).

We then use ACLs to enable every user in group flowershop to modify all files. When a new customer account is created, we set the ACLs as follows:

setfacl -Rm \
d:group:admin:rwx,d:user:www-data:r-x,d:user:$USERNAME:rwx,d:group:$USERNAME:rwx,\
  group:admin:rwx,  user:www-data:r-x,  user:$USERNAME:rwx,  group:$USERNAME:rwx \
/home/$USERNAME/

This does the following:

• Gives group admin (for us, the hosting providers) rwx
• Gives user www-data (Apache) r-x to the files*
• Gives user $USERNAME rwx to the files
• Gives group $USERNAME rwx to the files

This setup appears to be working well for us, but we are open to any suggestions for doing it better.

_{* we use suexec for CGI/PHP running as the customer account}

You could use proftpd which offers a SFTP frontend. This way you can unite SFTP, FTP and FTP/S in one daemon. However you cannot use port 22 for SFTP or you'll have to give up on SSH on that port since proftpd and sshd cannot bind the same ports for SFTP.