[pmwiki-users] Error encountered with upgrade to 2.2 beta 65

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 04:02:06PM -0400, Henrik wrote:
>    Thanks for pointing me to the specific module responsible for the
>    security, Patrick, and for the reality check.
> 
>    I am continuing to investigate alternate webserver hosts.
>    canadianwebhosting.com looks promising. They use an suPHP scheme which
>    looks tight but workable, with "Your scripts and directories can have a
>    maximum of 755 permissions" (all files have the same owner with rwx). I
>    presume that would be workable? Would I have to reconfigure the
>    umask(002); statement in pmwiki.php for this?

You might want to add umask(022); near the beginning of your config.php,
but other than that you should find that things run much better under
suPHP.


Pm



>  On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 10:11:49AM -0400, Henrik wrote:
>   
> 
>  This security change by my webhost is confirmed. In response to my query
>  they sent me the following response.
> 
>  =============================
> 
>  The web server security is setup such that it will automatically block system related words while posting data from php based applications, as this may lead to web server exploit. We request you to stop using system related words in your applications.
> 
>  =============================
> 
>  So suddenly none of my websites can post external links (with the string
>  "http://" anywhere in the page), and hundreds if not thousands of pages
>  that have this protocol embedded are suddenly uneditable.
> 
>  Truly horrible. A complete nightmare!
> 
>  But nothing to do with PmWiki.
>     
> 
> 
>  Just to follow up on this -- this particular issue is described
>  at http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/Troubleshooting#mod_security .
>  There is no PmWiki-based workaround to it, as the problem is well
>  outside of PmWiki (as you've recognized).
> 
>  I've never heard of someone using mod_security to block "http://"
>  before, though, so that's new (and an additional reason to doubt
>  the sanity of the webhosting provider).  Note that this security
>  measure affects not only PmWiki, but also any application that
>  tries to use an input form where someone might want to provide
>  an http:// link (e.g., comments to blog postings, shopping carts,
>  etc.).
> 
>  Pm
> 
>   
> 
>  --
> 
>  Henrik Bechmann
>  www.bechmann.ca
>  Webmaster, www.dufferinpark.ca