Bug#911871: proftpd-basic: Global directives overwritten by virtualhosts

[Drexl Johannes]

Package: proftpd-basic
Version: 1.3.5b-4
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,
setting GroupOwner in a global <directory> statement gets ignored by a
<virtualhost> configuration without being explicitely set anew in said
<virtualhost>. Other options, such as Umask, are not being ignored,
despite being configured in the same <directory> statement. Even copying
the <directory> statement to the virtual host isn't working for
GroupOwner.

To make things worse, global DebugLevel is also ignored by virtual
hosts, and has to be set anew in there to work again (but at least it does),
which makes this bug extremely hard to pin down in the first place. Also 
GroupOwner is quite evasive as an option all by itself, without proper
description and massive pitfalls (on Debian at least PersistentPasswd 
seems to be needed set 'on' to even let proftpd TRY to chown, which 
seemingly prompts people asking for help for this option to dump it lateron
and find another way instead of trying further to use it; I found only 
one guy who was determined enough to solve this issue on BSD).

As of now I have not found a way to enable GroupOwner in virtual host
configurations, but as this is necessary for our setup I'm determined to
solve this problem one way or another.

My suggestion: Don't overwrite globally set options without explicit
manual re-setting of said options.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.5
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-8-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages proftpd-basic depends on:
ii  adduser            3.115
ii  debianutils        4.8.1.1
ii  libacl1            2.2.52-3+b1
ii  libc6              2.24-11+deb9u3
ii  libcap2            1:2.25-1
ii  libmemcached11     1.0.18-4.1
ii  libmemcachedutil2  1.0.18-4.1
ii  libncurses5        6.0+20161126-1+deb9u2
ii  libpam-runtime     1.1.8-3.6
ii  libpam0g           1.1.8-3.6
ii  libpcre3           2:8.39-3
ii  libssl1.0.2        1.0.2l-2+deb9u3
ii  libtinfo5          6.0+20161126-1+deb9u2
ii  libwrap0           7.6.q-26
ii  lsb-base           9.20161125
ii  netbase            5.4
ii  sed                4.4-1
ii  ucf                3.0036
ii  zlib1g             1:1.2.8.dfsg-5

proftpd-basic recommends no packages.

Versions of packages proftpd-basic suggests:
pn  openbsd-inetd | inet-superserver  <none>
ii  openssl                           1.1.0f-3+deb9u2
pn  proftpd-doc                       <none>
pn  proftpd-mod-geoip                 <none>
pn  proftpd-mod-ldap                  <none>
pn  proftpd-mod-mysql                 <none>
pn  proftpd-mod-odbc                  <none>
pn  proftpd-mod-pgsql                 <none>
pn  proftpd-mod-sqlite                <none>

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/proftpd/blacklist.dat [Errno 2] Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden: '/etc/proftpd/blacklist.dat'
/etc/proftpd/dhparams.pem [Errno 2] Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden: '/etc/proftpd/dhparams.pem'

-- no debconf information