Fixing permissions after FTPing ASP.NET code to a Linux system

First off, I'm running Mono to run ASP.NET on Linux, but that's not the question.

It appears that, every time I clear out my application directory and upload, I have to go back in 开发者_JS百科and fix the permissions. What I'm doing is

chmod -R -c 755 /var/www/*

...and there are two questions.

1. What's the deal with having to do this every time I FTP? Feels flaky.
2. Is there a better permissions set than 755? Do I want different permissions for the /bin directory? Or can I fix this all with one fell swoop of chown?

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It could depend on your FTP server and configuration. I always used this and it worked:

chmod 777 /path/...