Hi I'm having an interesting morning! Especially as I just noticed that replies don't go back to the list by default. I'll have to remember that one. Ok, so I've had a lot of success and one big and, I expect, classic novice, error. The good news is that I have uninstalled vsftpd and can access my file system remotely using FileZilla via openSSH. I've also made www-data the owner of /var/www/ and added the user I use to login with to the www-data group. Now everything works as expected (Yay!). Then I went back and, as recommended, disabled root access via SSH. This is where I think I made my novice error, because when I SSH into the box now I can no longer 'sudo'. In fact I get the message: <user> is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported. This of course means I can't even shut the machine down remotely. Before I take a monitor and keyboard downstairs to it, is there a way I can get around this (after you've all had a good laugh of course!)? Thanks! -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer@gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com