29 February 2012, 10:15

Dajan,

Hi. Thank you, thank you, and thank you. You solved the mystery for me. Being a copy-paste beginning admin, I did not realize the mistake, "apache.apache," as you pointed out. Of course, it should be "chmod -R apache:apache" for centOS. So the instructions may be rewritten as follows.

Original:

You will need to make the maharadata directory writable by the web server user. You can either change its owner to be the web server user, or you can chmod it to 777. The latter isn't recommended, but if you're on shared hosting it's what you'll probably have to do. FTP programs will allow you to chmod the directory.

My suggestion:

You will need to make the maharadata directory writable by the web server user. You can either change its owner to be the web server user, or you can chmod it to 777.

      chown -R apache:apache maharadata

      or

      chomod 777 maharadata

The latter isn't recommended, but if you're on shared hosting it's what you'll probably have to do. FTP programs will allow you to chmod the directory.

Does that sound right? I really appreciate your help.

Regard,

maigoofy

29 February 2012, 11:45

Yes sounds right.

I will advise to chmod -R 777 maharadata to be certain that all the inclosed folders are changed, not only the main one.

dajan

29 February 2012, 16:37

Hi,

Chmod -R 777 is definitely good for diagnosing if it's a permissions issue, but ideally on production 'chown -R' the webserver's user and group (and chmod back to a chmod that has restrictions on those not in necessary users and groups) should be done if at all possible, because of the serious security implications.

If you're on a shared hosting, it's worth asking the host. It's in their interests to help you.

Thanks,
Melissa.

29 February 2012, 18:31

Thank you, dajan and Melissa.

So, Melissa, are you saying that "chomod -R 777 maharadata" is really not recommended?

Suppose it is OK to do

    chown -R apache:apache maharadata

Then what should I "chomod" to maharadata?

Thank you, both,

maigoofy

29 February 2012, 19:44

Hi Maigoofy,

Setting chmod 777 would mean that everybody on the server can do everything to this file.

Chmod deals with 3 parties of people and each of those 7s represents one of the parties.

The first 7 represents the individual user who owns the file. The second 7 represents group who owns the file. and the last 7 represents "everyone on the server" and is commonly referred to as "the world".

Each of the numbers used is a sum of the permissions they have. There's read, write and execute. It can be a bit confusing to remember. http://catcode.com/teachmod/numeric.html has a quick lesson on how it all works.

In the end though, 7 terms means "read, write and execute". 5 is "read and execute" and 0 is no permissions.

The absolute maximum I would put this at is 775, so that nobody except the owner and the group can write new things to the directory or change the files already there.

However on shared hosting, as stated before, this can be complicated because you're usually sharing the webserver user with other people. It can stop you from being fully secure, but you should definitely be as secure as you can get by with! :)

Hope this helps!

Thanks,
Melissa

29 February 2012, 23:06

Thank you for your quick response. And sorry for being a slow learner, but I have to understand in my own terms to really get it. What do you think of the suggestion below?

Best,

maigoofy

---------------------------------

My suggestion (updated for a slow beginning admin like me):

You will need to make the maharadata directory writable by the web server user. You can either change its owner to be the web server user, or you can chmod it to 775.

      chown -R apache:apache maharadata

      or

      chmod -R 775 maharadata

But "chomod -R 777 maharadata" is not recommended for security reasons. Talk to the admin if you are on a shared server.