I'm running a server for a php bulletin board for a mate, only i have the root password but he does have a account on the machine... he has ftp access to his home dir, which he is chrooted into but i have binded in /var/www so that he can upload the bulletin board or anything else he wants there, i have added his account to the www-data group but he still can't write to the web dir. I checked the ownership of /var/www and apparently it is owned by root! surely it should be owned by www-data? also, does this mean apache is running as root? (if so, how can i change this?) This is a ubuntu server install which i installed apache, mysql, php etc manually.
You'll need to change ownership of the /var/www directory to the user/group who needs access. It doesn't mean that Apache is running as root, since it only needs to be able to read files from that directory.
