can't create a directory – uploads for multisite

I have been looking at the various posts related to this topic but so far have not found a solution that works for me.

Like many others, I have apparently successfully installed multisite only to stumble at the point of testing my image uploads. I continually get the error “Unable to create directory /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads/2011/11. Is its parent directory writable by the server?”

Now by ‘parent directory’ I infer we are talking about wp-content. It was set to 755 and was owned by ’33’, whatever that is. The group was 33 as well. I changed this to 766 and 775 with no luck. I even tried 777 because I read that would work and you could change it back and it would still work. Neither happened in my case. I changed the group and the owner to root with no luck. I stopped and started Apache with no luck. I read about the different settings for each site under the network admin, but I also read that for the main site (the only one I have at the moment) the images are supposed to upload to ‘uploads’ and to blogs.dir for all the subsites, so I left those settings alone. I manually created uploads but that didn’t work either, although I did get a ‘crunching…’ message this time before I was told i could not create the directory. I even tried making ‘apache’ the owner, nothing has worked.

I greatly appreciate your time and assistance in resolving this issue. Thank you.