I'm basically trying to give a user access to a directory in my webroot so he can edit and change files.

The user is 'rob' and he ftps into my server and is automatically chrooted to the directory. Lets say /var/www/html/rob/ . I added rob to the apache group when the files in this directory are owned by rob he can edit and change them but they wont be served by apache(even with 774 perms). I get a permission error. However if its owned by apache the user rob cannot edit any of the files in the directory.(even with 774 perms).

How can I get this to work. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I'm using vsftpd on fedora core 4.

You may have the chown -R apache:rob /var/www/html/rob. This will set the group to apache and the user to rob. If you give the group rw permissions to the directory and all files this should fix it. You might also want to chmod g+s /var/www/html/rob to make sure any new files are owned by the apache group and have rw permissions.

Hope this helps.