Drupal: unable to delete settings.php

After the upgrade to Drupal 6.x I ran into the problem that the new settings.php in the sites/default folder could not be overwritten due to a file permissions problem: 550 Could not delete settings.php: Permission denied.

I changed the file permissions to read and write (644) and tried again, no go.

Turns out that the file permissions on the sites/default folder itself were set to 555, read and execute for owner/group/public. Once I changed that to 755 (write for owner) I had no problem overwriting the file.

New permissions on the
sites/default folder

The other sites I maintain are running Drupal 5 and have the permissions for the sites/default folder set to 755 so this could be a Drupal 6 thing.