I recently have been migrating my hosting accounts from mediatemple [they suck, no link] to slicehost [http://www.slicehost.com] . Slicehost sets you up with any linux distro you want and you handle the rest.

In other words, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m not used to having to manage packages, etc. And I’ve found myself constantly having to rebuild my 8.04 VM. All you got is SSH, who ya gonna call?

The goal here is to FTP so open Terminal or Putty [http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html]
and ssh root@ipaddress

We need to install an FTP Service

 sudo apt-get install vsftpd

Now we want to make some changes to the FTP config

If you’re running Windows you’re going to need Cygwin [http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe]

install Vim [http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc] or MacVim [http://code.google.com/p/macvim/]

now open Vim (not gVim)

:e scp://root@ipaddress//etc/vsftpd.conf

now we can configure the FTP settings inside Vim

The Vim command for inserting text is i

Turn anonymous access off (if you want)

anonymous_enable=NO

uncomment these lines so you can log in with server account

#local_enable=YES
#write_enable=YES

Hit the escape key to exit out of insert mode in Vim
then type :wq to save and close Vim

go back to Terminal or Putty and start the FTP service 

sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd start

You’re done!

Kinda