WinSCP not working correctly

December 3, 2013 5.7k views
nostrus
By:
nostrus
Hi! I set up my Debian 7.1 droplet according to the tutorials, and created a new user with admin rights. I want to use that user to copy files over with WinSCP, but I get "scp /path permission denied" messages, even after giving that user chown and chmod 777 rights to my /var/www folder. What should still be set up? Csaba
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4 Answers
pablo December 3, 2013
What's the output of: 
ls -la /var/www
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nostrus December 4, 2013
drwxrwxrwx 2 customuser root 4096 Dec 3 06:56 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Dec 3 06:56 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 177 Dec 3 06:56 index.html
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nostrus December 4, 2013
Ok, my lack of knowledge... I thought that chown is recursive by default, but it's not.
In order to change ownership of a directory and all of its files, you have to use chown -R.
This solved my problem. (Still would be nice to include in the initial server setup tutorial, though :) )
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pablo December 4, 2013
Have you considered using SFTP, instead of SCP?

SCP vs. SFTP

Given that both SCP and SFTP utilize the SSH protocol in connecting to another computer, the two methods are fairly equal in regard to security. SFTP has a slight edge in regard to efficiency, because an interrupted file-transfer can resume where it left off in the event of a broken connection that is later re-established.
See How To Use Filezilla to Transfer and Manage Files Securely on your VPS.
How To Use Filezilla to Transfer and Manage Files Securely on your VPS
by Pablo Carranza
This article will teach you how to use Filezilla to transfer and manage files securely on your VPS.
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