this one's running in cygwin, but i think i remember seeing this on another install before. just can't remember what i did.

i have a user "remote", that i want jailed in their ftp directory.
so i have "DefaultRoot ~/ftp" in my proftpd.conf file. (i also tried the full path)

this works fine if i view it with a browser like firefox. /.. is the same directory,
but if i use an ftp program (filezilla on windows for example), i start in ~, and i can walk the whole filesystem up and down.

any idea what i'm missing?

----edit-----
oh just reallized, i can only move out of that directory when i'm using sftp
but i'm not sure why

I've had the same problem, acutally - while ftp clients work as expected, I've noticed that sftp clients (such as WinSCP) invariably ignore any DefaultRoot I try to impose. If anyone's got a solution to this, I'd like to know it also

Boy do i feel silly.

sftp isn't using proftpd, it's part of sshd

you can build a jail for it manually, with restricted shell etc. i've seen some postings here for it, but that's more work than i need right now.