cannot chang directory to www folder in vsftpd

[Jeff Vian]

On Wed, 2005-08-24 at 21:14 -0400, David L wrote:
> I have been using windows for some time as a server and was told by
> many that Linux is better. However I have tried and tried to be able
> to navigate to the /var/www/html directory using ftp and cannot seem
> to do that simple little thing. Any way I can ftp to my home
> directorys fine. I would like to use fedora for a web/mail/ftp server
> but this is driving me nuts. Everything else is working fine. Help
> please! David
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An easy way to set that up would be to use one of the options to mount
that allows you to remount a directory.

1.  create a directory in your home directory named whatever you choose
(I use html).

2.  issue the command "mount -o bind /var/www/html /home/<username>/html

You now should be able to see all the contents of the /var/www/html
directory at /home/user/html

The next thing you need is for the user to be able to write to
the /var/www/html directory.

To accomplish that I make the applicable users members of the apache
group,  set their umask accordingly (the files created/modified need to
be group writable so I use 002 for the umask.), and last set
the /var/www/html directory and contents as group writeable "chmod -R 
g+w /var/www/html".

While there are other ways to achieve the same thing this works for me
and does not change security in any way except to make the /var/www/html
directory to be group writable by the apache group.  Since the server is
already able to write to that directory tree as the owner (apache) it
seems to me to not make a big difference.

If you are running selinux it likely has other ramifications that are
not addressed above.