Chown: changing ownership not permitted, even though running as root

ftpownershippermissionsproftpdroot

I managed to configure my Raspberry Pi as an FTP server with ProFTPD. The only problem is, I can´t upload and rename files and Windows Explorer says:

350 File or directory exists,ready for destination name
550 Rename xyz permission denied

Now I´ve read I have to chown this folder to the FTP user, but this does not work.

I have tried:

sudo chown -R pi /var/www (my default pi account)
sudo chown -R piftp /var/www (the ftp account)

sudo su
chown -R root /var/www

All I´m getting is

chown:changing ownership of … : Operation not permitted

I already chmodded this directory to 777.

/var/www is mounted from a vfat volume on my external hard disc. Looking at it with ls -l I see all files and folders have owner root and group root and all of these folders have permissions drwxr-xr-x.

Can someone please help?

Best Answer

I don't think VFAT supports the type of permissions you're trying to set. In such case, the permissions are set the same for all files, when mounting the disk. Something like:

sudo mount -t vfat -o uid=piftp,gid=piftp /dev/sda1 /var/www

See also Can't change permission/ownership/group of external hard drive on Ubuntu here on Super User, or the external resource Connect your Raspberry Pi to a USB hard disk.

Related Question