Hi!

Set up my very first Linux box today with Slackware 10.1. With a lot of reading I got PHP and MySQL running.

With a cross-over network cable I connected my XP machine to the Linux box to explore web-hosting, etc. I created a user with the following command: adduser mark, then it prompts: UID ... Initial Group, Additional Groups, Home Directory, Shell, Exp date, etc.

When I use Filezilla to upload websites to the /var/www/htdocs directory it gives a "Critical transfer error" and does not upload the files. This is probably a permission error but how can I ftp as mark to upload files and create directories in the htdocs directory on the server, oh and the cgi-bin directory? My goal is to learn oscommerce and commerce-cgi with this box; doing it "local' is faster and cheaper!

Thank you for reading hope you can help.

I'm not familiar with the error you listed, but it does sound like a permissions problem. Each directory/file in *nix has permissions attached to it, and user mark doesn't have permission to create files in /var/www/html. The easiest solution (that is also safe) is to ftp the files into /home/mark/, and then use sudo or su to move the files into /var/www/html. You could also change the permissions on /var/www/html/, but that would make a real world webserver unsecure. As you plan to use this to learn, it is best to use the box as a real world server would be, and allowing easy access to the web directory is not the best of ideas. That will make it a 2 step process, the ftp step, then use putty or whatever your ssh client is to move the files. Many web developers like a program called SCP or something like that, which is just a port of the *nix scp (secure copy) program for Window$.

You could also change the permissions to allow mark to write to the directory, or ftp as root, but I don't think most ftp servers will allow root to log in. The ftp server I use, vsftp doesn't allow that at all, unless you modify the .conf file.

Peace,
JimBass

Jim thanks for the reply! I did a chmod 777 on the htdocs directory and now I can upload files to my "www.mynamewebsite.com" directory, without Filezilla giving any errors. The website display in my browser as well. I understand that this is absolutely not secure, but I don't know what the command is to move files from the home dir to the htdocs dir in Linux? I am using putty to log into the server from my Windows PC.

I also tried the " Ln -s /home/MYNAME /var/www/htdocs " command to link the http dir to my user account to transfer files from there - uploading didn't work.

As you said, it is not possible to log in as root via an FTP client, unless changes are made...

Thanks again,

Have a great day.