I apologize if this question has already been answered. I searched and found a couple of people wanting to do the same thing but didn't see any really good answers. I'm a real newbie at Linux in general, so please talk to me as if I'm a 5-year old child so I can have some chance of understanding.

I'm running an Apache web server on a FC3 system. I want to be able to upload web content with FTP from remote locations. I do not need (or want) anybody to have FTP access other than me. I have vsftpd installed and working, but when I log in, I get my home directory. What I want is my /var/www/html directory so I can upload my content, but I get a "permission denied" error when I try to change to that directory. (BTW, I'm connecting to my server through Internet Exploder on a Windows machine.) What do I need to configure (and how do I need to configure it) to allow this and deny FTP access to any user other than me?

Also, the files currently in the html folder were placed there while I was logged in as root, so they are now owned by root. Therefore, they are read-only when I am logged in as joe, the username I want to use when I connect via FTP. I changed the permissions on the html folder, but it didn't change them on any of the sub-folders. Is there an easy way for joe to take ownership of all the files in that folder or do I have to change them individually?

If there is a better way to do what I want to do instead of FTP, I'm open to suggestions, but please don't tell me to do something else unless you're prepared to tell me how. Thanks for your patience and for any help you can give me.

I am also a newbie to networking but i want to contribute something.I can solve your problem to some extent.

If you want to upload something from remote locations you can do it using vsftpd.You need not start apache , I think.
All the files you upload will be copied to /var/ftp by default.
Open your /etc/vsftpd.conf file.
In order to close the access to others , comment the line
anonymous_enable=YES
Uncomment the follwing line to enable upload.
write_enable=YES

I am not sure about rest of the things.

newbie.

Thanks, but I am trying to upload files into the /var/www/html folder. Apache is already running. I want the content I upload to be immediately available on my website without me having to go to my server and transfer it into that file manually. I appreciate your help, though.

1) chown -R joe /var/www/html
2) Don't use FTP for anything if you can help it. Even "Very secure" FTPd is still a breakin waiting to happen.
3) Use SCP/SFTP. WinSCP is a nice (well, some think it's nice) GUI to that end.
4) Don't use Exploder to FTP to anything. IE sucks (and no, not just because it's a windows thing)

I agree IE sucks. In fact, I don't use it for anything besides FTP because I seem to have a problem connecting with Firefox.

How does one use SCP/SFTP? Like I said, I'm a Linux retard.

That setting is the default, so commenting it out will still allow anon connections. It must be set to NO.

You should find this useful: http://www.brennan.id.au/14-FTP_Server.html

Miles.

Yes, that looks like it will be very useful. I'm going to read all that and see if I can get it figured out. Thanks.

Well, I've kind of worked around my problem by putting a link to my html folder on my desktop, since my default FTP directory seems to be my desktop. Now I just go to /Desktop/html and I have no problem. Is there any reason I shouldn't do it this way? Is there a way to change my default FTP directory to the html folder instead of my desktop? If I just go to the desktop and try to type in the path to the folder I want, it tells me I don't have permission, but when I do it through my link it works fine.