Hello,
I must admit - I am not a server admin. Most of my work has been done on shared hosting with simple FTP connections. I also don’t have a great knowledge of Unix or the commandline.
My client has decided to use their own server for a new project, which was built by the local ISP and housed at their datacentre.
I am unable to SSH into the web root due to security, so I need to push all my files into a sub directory of /var/tmp/ and move them from there, but nothing seems to be working for me.
I am totally lost here using PuTTY for this. Is there any good free GUI tools I can use to do this server management?
Seems unusual that you can access var/tmp but not the web root. What user are you logged in as?
You might want to try winSCP as a file management utility.
I have sudo privileges. The system administrator says that by not giving access to the web root, it makes the server more secure, but I am not really sure how. A badguy could still use commandline.
I’ve got WinSCP installed, and can use that to get my files onto my tmp directory, but can’t push them to the root from there. My system admin says I need to use commandline for that and WinSCP (unless I am doing something wrong). The issue seems to be that I need to be able to elevate my writes to sudo only when I want to transfer to the web root.
I’d love to be able to use a tool like WinSCP/Filezilla that is GUI based to just be able to move my files around on the server as needed.
You will scp the files into the server, normally in your /home/ folder (the folder for your user) then you can either move them (sudo mv) to the correct place. Normally, I’d suggest files on a shared server would be in your /home/user/public_html/ folder or similar, however if they are to go in the root /var/www/ then you will either have to move them like you are, or have the permissions of the folder changed so you can write there directly.
If you struggle with server administration, maybe it’ll be worth getting someone who manages the server to set up an FTP server for you?