Permissions and extensions

JKGiants

I am a newbie and it feels like a miracle that I actually have a forum up and ready to go. A number of my extensions are not working. I read the troubleshooting and understand that this usually has to do with permissions. I think I understand what to do, but need to clarify. In the Troubleshooting section it says: Vanilla saves configuration settings to the conf/settings.php file instead of the database in order to keep the application lean and fast. In order to allow Vanilla to make changes to those files, you must give your web server permission to write to the conf files. ... In order to fix these problems there are two methods for linux/unix servers. You either need to chmod the files so that the web server has permission to edit them, or you need to chown the files so that the web server owns the files and can retain full control over them. You can chmod the files so that they are wide open to all users on the server with a command like: chmod --recursive 777 /path/to/vanilla/conf/ Here is where I need clarification: Using my ftp client, Cyberduck, do I simply go to "Send Command" , write "chmod --recursive 777 /path/to/vanilla/conf/" and hit send? Is it that simple? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Wanderer

Don't know about Cyberduck (I use Interarchy), simply select the folder and see if you have a CHMOD or change permissions function.

Are you sure it needs to be 777? I am away from my access point at the moment, maybe someone else can chime in?

Minisweeper

777 is usually a good place to start for troubleshooting but you can probably drop it to 666 or 644 depends how your server is set up.

JKGiants

Thanks. How do I see if I have CHMOD or change permission functions? Using Cyberduck, I go to the folder for FCKeditor. I get info on that folder and for the owner and for the group, read, write, and execute are all checked. It appears that all I can do is select or unselect permissions, not control the numbers. Is this what you are referring to? For the owner and for the group, the permissions appear to be 775.

Minisweeper

Selecting and unselecting permissions should control the numbers. It's measured in binary where rwx = 4+2+1 = 7 (and likewise, rw. = 4+2 = 6) Can you tell us who the owner and group of the files are?

JKGiants

"Can you tell us who the owner and group of the files are?" I would be happy to, if I knew the answer. I had assumed I was. How do I tell. (You may be getting the impression that this is not what I do for a living)

Wanderer

OK mate, just downloaded and installed Cyberduck.

To set permissions...

1. In the list, select the file or folder you want to change permissions on
2. Right-click or control-click
3. Select "Info" from the menu that pops up

4. Set the permissions there

Some permissions may be referred to as rwxrwxrwx but this translates to 777
Experiment with the check boxes to get the settings you need.
Oh and there is the "Apply changes recursively" option too.

Cyberduck is not the best FTP client out there but it's free and seems to do an OK job until you out-grow it.

Sorry this took so long, I'm chained to a useless Windows box all day!

Posted: Saturday, 27 October 2007 at 9:04AM

Minisweeper

Wanderer will Cyberduck tell him the owner and group properties of the file? It aught to but I'm using transmission here and never touched cyberduck...

JKGiants

Aha. Thanks Wanderer. I did actually know how to do that. When you check all of those boxes, I see that it goes to 777. This confirms that I was actually setting the permissions properly. I guess the problems I am having with extensions is not related to the permissions. BTW- the odds of my "outgrowing" Cyberduck are about the same as my "outgrowing" my Sunday morning softball league because I'm ready to make $10 million dollars as a pro baseball player. I am just trying to set up a forum to improve the adoption of children in the US. I am shocked by how much technology I have had to learn. Thank you very much for putting this in terms a non-techie can understand.

grapz

Hi. I'm having a kind of similar problem. During the setup I do a "chmod 777 ./conf" as per the setup instructions and all is good. But when I try to upload a custom language.php to the conf/ directory, I can't do this because www is the owner of the files. I understand why, but what I don't get is that according to http://lussumo.com/docs/doku.php?id=vanilla:administrators:languages#small_modifications I have to upload my custom language.php to "conf/language.php". I see that it points to "conf/language.php" so I'm thinking it might be placed in another location, but I can't really see where. I got a feeling that this got a simple solution, but I can't really see it, anyone that can help ?

Wanderer

Whenever my files get owned by WWW the only way to get ownership back is to ask the host support people to do it.

Posted: Thursday, 1 November 2007 at 6:34PM

grapz

Ok, but it is a known problem and it just happends sometimes ? I'll ask my ISP to change it.

Wanderer

It's my understanding that badly written scripts are the cause, they create files or open and write to files without ensuring permissions are restored to correct ones, leaving them in a state of limbo so www takes ownership of them.

Maybe a more technically aware person could shed more light but that's it in a nutshell.

Dinoboff

That's mean that the web server run php with its own account. The owner of the file created by php (while the vanilla installation) is the web server, not you. There is nothing much we can do except writing a setting page for updating language.php (or create an easy way for people to install Vanilla manually).

grapz

I talked to my ISP now, and they said they would upgrade my account with PHP5/suphp-webserver so that all scripts will use the account's username for the ownership, and not the WWW user, so that should fix future problems for me atleast :)