Setting vsftpd to allow me uploading to /var/www, got 500 OOPS: cannot change directory:/root

Question

I'm using an Amazon EC2 istance as developer and testing machine. Since i'm on windows i can't mount the virtual EBS volume for editing purposes. Too bad.

For this reason i've installed and configured vsftpd server to allow me quickly edit and upload PHP files from Windows to /var/www/html folder on the instance.

I've uncommented lines containing the word "root" in /etc/vsftpd/ftpuserss and /etc/vsftpd/user_list in order to allow root login with FileZilla.

My /ect/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf contains (among other):

pam_service_name=vsftpd
userlist_enable=YES
tcp_wrappers=YES
pasv_enable=YES
pasv_min_port=1024
pasv_max_port=1048
pasv_address=<public ip addess>
local_root=/var/www/html

I know maybe login as a root can be a security issue but i'm not master in security stack on linux. Feel free to post any security tip to solve my problem. By the way, i'm getting this error:

500 OOPS: cannot change directory:/root

It seems that vsftpd try to change the ftp root to /root (of course it doesn't exist), ignoring the local_root option.

Answer 1

No, No, NO, NOOO - that is entirely the wrong thing to do. You are sending your root password unencrypted across the internet. STOP !

If you really must use FTP then create a user account specifically for this. It would be much better if you created a user account to do this and then used scp or sftp and public keys (check out putty for windows).