sFTP access issues on Ubuntu

I've setup sFTP access on an Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic server but i'm having what i think are permission issues.

With the sFTP account i've created it logs in automatically to:

/srv/www/domain.com/

However, i'm only actually able to upload to:

/srv/www/domain.com/public_html

This is not workable as i need to create directories etc parallel to public_html. I appreciate this is something i've probably done wrong as its patched together from a few help files.

I followed these instructions to create a group for sFTP access, i then created a user and then mod'ed their home directory using:

usermod -d /srv/www/domain.com newuser

Let me know if there's any other information you need to troubleshoot this.

OUTPUT OF COMMANDS

> ls -al /srv/www/domain.com/ | grep public_html
drwxr-xr-x 2 newuser newuser 4096 2010-08-24 12:38 public_html

> ls -al /srv/www/ | grep domain.com
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 2010-08-24 12:21 domain.com

> groups newuser

newuser : newuser filetransfer

> ls -ld /srv/www/domain.com/
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 2010-08-24 12:21 /srv/www/domain.com/

Answer

You are using the ChrootDirectory directive of OpenSSH.

This will only work if the home directory of the respective user is owned by root:root and is not world or global writable (ie. has the permission mask 0755 but not 0770). sshd will issue a warning in your auth.log (or the destination of syslog facility AUTH) otherwise.