ftp folder no access help

i'm using cuteftp to upload files. according to the account setup i have full access and the directory should be "/home/user" however all i can access is "/"

i've tried uploading to this location but cannot access this folder from my web browser (using my domain as the URL) as i get a 404 error. i've also tried creating the /home/... directory and folder and while i can create these in cuteftp and then upload files there i still get an error when i try to access the folders.

lastly, if i try to "change directory" to "/home" i get a "550 /home" no such directory error

can anyone help tell me what i'm doing wrong and/or if something is not set up properly?

thank you.

Edited by nstop on 07/03/09 07:51 PM (server time).

In FTP, you're sandboxed to your own home directory, so going to / *is* /home/user. If you've created a Fully Hosted domain, it will create an example.com folder in your FTP home directory. That directory should already have a /logs and /Maildir in there. Is it *completely* empty?

-Scott

Thx Scott. I had actually setup a secondary FTP account so that I would keep the root account and the second one separate. I'll try logging into the root instead since logging into the secondary FTP account only gives me "/" and is otherwise completely empty. It might be I can only upload to the root user, and that doing this is the only way someone can grab those files by going to "http://www.mydomain.com/folder?

if that's the case then what's the purpose of having the ability to setup a secondary FTP access account?

In reply to:
Thx Scott. I had actually setup a secondary FTP account so that I would keep the root account and the second one separate. I'll try logging into the root instead since logging into the secondary FTP account only gives me "/" and is otherwise completely empty.

There is no concept of a "root" FTP account at DreamHost. Yes, there is an "initial" user setup of course when you signup. But that user is no more special than ones that you can add later.

Each user gets diskspace set aside for itself, called the home directory, and at the OS level the filesystem path to this home directory is /home/.glob/username and there is a preferred symlink /home/username since the .glob part may change from time to time.

Now the machine is running an FTP daemon, as well as SSH/SFTP programs. These operate differently. The FTP daemon is configured to allow access only to files in the home directory of the user you logged in as. Thus the FTP software will consider the path "/" to be the topmost level you can go, but it can be considered as /home/username and your FTP client can not override that.

Now SSH/SFTP on the other hand is different, there is no restriction on what directory you can access, and your client may very well show you "/home/.glob/username" in the path.

In reply to:
if that's the case then what's the purpose of having the ability to setup a secondary FTP access account?

There are many. Obviously if you are hosting sites for different clients you can separate them by having one user host one client and another user host another. Or if you are going to run CGI that uses a lot of resources it may help to manage them by having different users (ie one user for a forum subdomain and another for a blog subdomain). And if credentials are shared you can use them to transfer files from one person to another instead of using email or some web transfer service.

In reply to:
It might be I can only upload to the root user, and that doing this is the only way someone can grab those files by going to "http://www.mydomain.com/folder?

You can "Remap Sub-dir" to setup a url-path so that http://www.mydomain.com/folder/" can be served from a subdirectory of a different user. CGI files uploaded by the other user won't work though.

cool openvein.org -//-

much obliged for the clarification. i would have liked to have some control whereby the secondary account could have it's own directory/folder structure that could be "seen" via a browser as opposed to using the primary account/domain for this but your instructions for using "Remap" should be a good work-around.