uploading files to LAMP on UBUNTU Desktop

[shelac]

My apologies if this would best belong somewhere else but I decided to dive in.

I have an older computer that I thought that I would try to put to work as a developmental server. I have no experience with LINUX but had the notion that I would get my feet wet by downloading and installing UBUNTU 12.04 (Desktop) on it. That worked flawlessly. I then installed LAMP with a few hurdles of my own making, but eventually got it working and parked a few PHP files in the var/www directory and was able to access them there. I hardwired the machine to my Linksys Wireless router and can view the files from other Windows machines on the network.

My next objective was to attempt to sort out how I would be able to upload files to the Apache server on UBUNTU using something like Filezilla or preferably directly from Dreamweaver on a Windows 7 laptop.

I was optimistic when I saw the line “Connection established, waiting for welcome message...’ in the Filezilla log, but I have hit a dead end.

Status: Connecting to 192.168.1.105:80...
Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message...
Error: Connection timed out
Error: Could not connect to server

I have tried the sudo user name as well as “root” for a user name.

I installed webmin thinking that this might bring me closer to discovering the solution. I am clearly out of my league here. Does anyone have any advice for me as to what I need to install or how I need to configure what I have to achieve the desired results?

Thanks for your help.

[Wim Sturkenboom]

Status: Connecting to 192.168.1.105:80...

Why 80? That indicates that you're trying to connect to apache.

Do you have a FTP server (daemon) running? You use a ftp client to connect to a ftp server (daemon), not to a web server (daemon).

If you haven't done so, install e.g. vsftpd

[shelac]

Thanks for the quick response. I confess that I am completely clueless when it comes to this stuff. But you have to start somewhere. I came to the erroneous conclusion that I would want to connect to Apache.

I will install vsftpd

What port should I be using then?

[shelac]

Thanks again. Somewhere I read that it is Port 21 and it worked. Now it is a matter of learning how to edit some files, change permissions, etc. so that I can upload files and create directories.

[Wim Sturkenboom]

Great, please mark your thread as solved using the thread tools just above the first post on this page.

I never use /var/www; my web directories are in the user's home directory. This is an approach from long ago where I did not want to fight with permissions. Just a matter of changing the 'document root' in the apache configuration Only disadvantage is that apache can't write there but not everybody has a need for that and it can be solved by having a dedicated subdirectory where apache can write.

[shelac]

I appreciate your comment about fighting with permissions.

I bumbled around for a couple of hours last evening trying to get it set up so that I could create a directory and upload files to var/www. No success yet. Downloading files behaves.

I changed the vsftpd.conf file to allow creating directories but no combination of permissions that I tried would yield the results. It was set up for anonymous and I even tired changing that with no luck. And in my case it amounts to luck as I clearly don’t know what I’m doing. I have changed so many settings now that I will probably uninstall the whole thing to get back to equilibrium and start over.

I decided to walk away from it for a while and perhaps I will get an inspiration.

I would be the exclusive user of this developmental server and it is living on my home wireless router so I am thinking that security is not a major concern here.

Thanks again.