[pmwiki-users] Permissions puzzle

[Henrik]

Patrick,

I have attachment uploads set to use group subdirectories of an 
"uploads" directory. The userid/groupid of upload subdirectories created 
by PHP (PmWiki) before the upgrade are henrik/henrik (ie the 
userid/groupid of the master account). The userid/groupid of directories 
created by PHP after the upgrade are 99/99 identified in the phpinfo.php 
listing as nobody(99)/nobody(99).

I believe this constitutes proof, or at least evidence, that the 
userid/groupid of PHP had changed, as you suggested.

In the meantime I have changed the permissions of all PmWiki write 
directories in all my sites (some 80 subdirectories) to 777, which seems 
to resolve the problems caused by the change.

I've asked the company to change the PHP userid/groupid back to the 
master account values, as the change has also negatively effected other 
applications. We'll see what they do.

BTW after I pointed out to webserve.ca that the PHP 5.2.1 had been 
rolled back to 5.0.5, they promptly (within 4 hours) re-installed 5.2.1. 
They must have made a mistake. They're like that. Thanks for the heads up.

Best,

- Henrik

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 11:54:01AM -0400, Henrik wrote:
>   
>> I use PmWiki for buckets of websites on a single Unix webserver account. 
>> All was going well until my hosting company upgraded my shared hosting 
>> server to PHP 5.2.1. A good thing to upgrade, but all of a sudden all my 
>> wikis broke, with "unable to obtain .flock file" (among other things).
>>
>> After several days of (in the end) pointless dialog with my host service 
>> company (webserve.ca), I ended up having to change rights on all wiki.d 
>> and uploads directories from 755 to 777. I presume this means that 
>> whereas PHP previously had owner rights, it now has none, and therefore 
>> needs public access to write directories.
>>
>> Does anyone know where to look for a configuration change on my host 
>> that would make this happen? 
>>     
>
> I'm not sure that a PHP configuration change alone can explain the 
> entire issue.  It would help to know the ownerships for files created 
> before the change versus the ownerships of the files being created 
> after the change -- I suspect that the userid also changed in
> the process somewhere.
>
> Were the directories really 755 permissions (as opposed to
> 775) before the upgrade occurred?  If the directories were 755 
> and the files created by PmWiki were 644, that would imply that
> previous PmWiki (and PHP) were running under your userid instead
> of the "nobody" or "www" user.  
>
> Anyway, based on your description it looks like the PHP user may
> have changed somehow... but it's still odd.
>
>   
>> If useful, you can see the php 
>> configuration at dufferinpark.ca/phpinfo.php.
>>     
>
> Actually, that page says you're running 5.0.5, not 5.2.1 .
>
>   
>> My web host BTW proffered the rather desperate theory that someone had 
>> hacked my account and systematically altered permissions on all my wiki 
>> directories (there are at least a couple of dozen). This is not true. I 
>> checked<grin>.
>>     
>
> All of this gets down to a question of file and directory ownerships -- 
> which is why it's important to know the before/after to be able
> to say what might have happened or changed.
>
> Pm
>                                                   
>
>   

-- 

Henrik Bechmann
www.bechmann.ca
Webmaster, www.dufferinpark.ca

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