Rights and Spartacus

[Col. Kurtz]

I´m having this problem: When using Spartacus I get problems with the rights. I cannot change or delete those files anymore. My ISP told me

in den Verzeichnissen befanden sich Dateien welche dem User wwwrun zugeordnet waren. Der Grund dafür war, dass diese Dateien durch ein Script erzeugt wurden. Dadurch koennen Sie diese Dateien nicht loeschen. Ich habe für die Dateien einen Inhaberwechsel auf Ihren Nutzer veranlasst. Dadurch koennen Sie die Dateien nun loeschen.

This is annoying! What can I do about this?

[garvinhicking]

The best way would be to ask your provider to set the umask of www so that your ftp user can also have write permissions of the files. And put the www user into the same group as your FTP user is.

Basically it's all a matter how your provider is setting up the stuff; Serendipity does not touch any files, itjust creates a file and thinks that you have it properly configured that you yourself can also write/read the files. Spartacus cannot guess which write/read permissions to set, and making it 777 would incur a large security risk.

The only files that are chmod()ed by serendipity are the serendipity_config_local.inc.php, because that file should be accessed by as little users as possible, including your FTP account. In case you really need that, you could write a simple PHP script which does the chmod().

(Of course that simple "chmod('plugins/XXX', 0777)" also works if you want to access any ofthe plugin dirs/files).

Regards and HTH,
Garvin

[gwilsonmail]

I've had similar problems and they are impossible to mitigate without the ISP's help. The result is you break something and you have to wait hours for your ISP to change ownership and/or permissions!

My solution -
[1] Offline I make an entire set of directories and files, including a .htaccess file. I include all the additional plugins (see note 1) and any templates. The purpose here is to have every file and directory created so that the server does not have to create them when s9y or Spartacus runs. That's when the ownership problems start - the files become owned by the server not by you the user. You can't view them, read them or delete them!

[2] I ftp upload all the files to a "library" directory.

[3] Then I copy the "library" directory's contents to my blog's root directory.

[4] I make changes to the file permissions (chmod 777 or 766 via an ftp client)

[the directory containing your files]
/archives
/plugins
/tempates
/templates_c
.htaccess
serendipity_config_local.inc.php

[5] I start s9y and configure everything I need

[6] I NEVER use Spartacus online. If a new plugin/tempate becomes available I download it offline and ftp the files to my site.

With step [2] you can save yourself a lot of uploading and it makes it easier to copy the files to another s9y root directory (for 2nd blog, say).

As long as php code never has to create a file or a directory you can get away with this.

Let me say that there is nothing wrong with s9y or Spartacus - the problem lies entirely with the over protective attitude of ISPs running virtual servers. Also if you install s9y and don't constantly experiment with plugin's and templates you shouldn't run into this problem.

Notes
*1. With all the additional plugins added your PHP configuration needs to be set to at least 12MB of memory or the plugin admin screens will show a DNS error. It's well worth getting your ISP to make this change.

[garvinhicking]

One problem I see with your method (apart from it being surely time-intensive) is that you also need to pay attention if new plugins create their own DB tables.

Also note that in a perfect world your provider would run PHP as a FastCGI in a suExec chail setting the executing user to your FTP user and thus satisfying all needs in this regard you might ever face.

Sadly we're not living in a perfect world

Regards,
Garvin

[Col. Kurtz]

The thing is: I did a bunch of test-installations to check new plugins (see the feedback in the plugin forum) with the latest nightly builts etc... So I had to install/uninstall/delete/reset stuff. When I tried to delete those files and folders I couldn´t. I tried to modify a file and because it was installed with Spartacus I coudnt. All I can do is rename the files so that they matter anymore, but thats a workaround. Looks like I gotta talk to my ISP.

Thank you for the help.