Re: mkdir permission errors

Wei, Alice J. wrote:

________________________________________ From: Peter Ford [pete@justcroft.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 7:28 AM To: Wei, Alice J. Cc: php-general@lists.php.net Subject: Re: [PHP] mkdir permission errors Wei, Alice J. wrote:

-----Original Message----- From: Peter Ford [mailto:pete@justcroft.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 4:06 AM To: php-general@lists.php.net Subject: Re: [PHP] mkdir permission errors Wei, Alice J. wrote:

Hi, Rob: I forgot to mention that I have been using yum install. I have reinstalled the entire thing, put back all the packages, and then I went to /var and did a chmod -R 777 var, and then did a [root@localhost var]# chown -R apache:apache . Interestingly, I do not see anything different, and I still get this error that says my permission is denied. Here is my [root@localhost var]# ps awxu | grep -E 'apache|httpd'

root     31547  0.0  0.3  21268  6584 ?        Ss   16:12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   31549  0.0  0.2  21400  5572 ?        S    16:12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   31550  0.0  0.2  21400  4908 ?        S    16:12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   31551  0.0  0.2  21400  4908 ?        S    16:12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   31552  0.0  0.2  21400  4896 ?        S    16:12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   31553  0.0  0.2  21268  4860 ?        S    16:12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   31554  0.0  0.2  21268  4860 ?        S    16:12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   31555  0.0  0.2  21268  4860 ?        S    16:12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   31556  0.0  0.2  21268  4860 ?        S    16:12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
root     31708  0.0  0.0   4120   728 pts/1    R+   16:30   0:00 grep -E apache|httpd

Obviously, my last one has already changed the owner to apache already.Nevertheless, I am still denied even when I am now logged in as root. Is this anything with firewalls?

Hang on a minute: you're original message said the error was: Warning: chmod() [function.chmod]: Permission denied in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/file_linux.php on line 27 But you say you've re-installed, and done "chmod -R 777 var" and "chown -R apache:apache ." in /var A few things there: When you are changing permissions and ownerships on such a large scale, you should always use absolute paths to be sure you are doing the right thing - like "chmod -R 777 /var" and "chown -R apache:apache /var" Next, changing permission and ownership recursively on something like /var is likely to wreck your system in weird and wonderful ways, and is pretty difficult to undo - you might be looking at a total OS reinstall here (once you've solved your Apache problems) Finally, the error message refers to a file in /usr/local/apache/htdocs, but you then are changing permissions in /var - where is your web root?! It looks like your PHP code has the /usr/local/apache/htdocs path hard-coded, when your web files are actually in /var/something... I forgot to mention that I use Fedora on a Linux machine. I used yum install apache and yum install php to install my packages. Therefore, I don't have a /usr/local/apache/htdocs folder. The web root is now /var/www/html, which originally I do have /usr/local/apache/htdocs that I configured during previous installations. This is not there anymore after my reinstallations since yesterday. Do I really have to reinstall the entire Fedora? I hate to say that my scripts worked fine BEFORE yesterday until the power went out and nothing went right after I have restarted the entire system. Alice

You don't *have* to reinstall Fedora (yet) - that was just a warning that changing ownership and permissions on /var might cause some problems later... So the question is, does the error message say that it cannot change permissions on

        /usr/local/apache/htdocs/file_linux.php

or

         /var/www/html/file_linux.php

? And does your PHP script have the correct path? The original problem may just have been that the /usr/local file system was mounted read-only after the power outage (perhaps due to some disk corruption caused by the failure?). Since then you have reinstalled apache, but possibly not in the place your PHP script expects it to be. That would be my first thing to check... This sounds really dumb, but it turned out that I have some inconsistencies going on in my httpd.conf file. Now I have changed both groups to daemon, and changed to owners as Rob suggested. Now it is finally working fine. Would I still need to change everything back to 0755? Or, should I ask, what is the appropriate permission I should be using here? Alice

At least that explains why the problem arose from a power failure: you had some new settings in the configuration which needed an apache restart to make them happen, and when the server rebooted, apache picked up the new settings... The problem is that if you did "chmod -R 777 /var", you changed every file /var and ALL of its subdirectories to have 777 permissions, and there's not an easy way of knowing what the permissions were on all of those files and directories. While your system will probably work happily with everything in /var world-writeable, it's not very safe (in a security sense). If you also did something like "chown -R apache:apache /var" then you have lost the ownership settings of all those files too, again with no easy way of undoing that. In that case, setting ownership to 755 really will break things, because then anything not running as apache will not be able to write to /var ! Some programs check the ownership and file permissions of the files they use, and will refuse to work if they are wrong or insecure - that might be a problem if your machine is used for more than just a PHP development server. That's why I said you might need to re-install the OS. Of course, you could always just restore /var from your system backup ;) For now, I think that 777 permissions will probably be OK, but keep an eye out for hackers... -- Peter Ford, Developer phone: 01580 893333 fax: 01580 893399 Justcroft International Ltd. www.justcroft.com Justcroft House, High Street, Staplehurst, Kent TN12 0AH United Kingdom Registered in England and Wales: 2297906 Registered office: Stag Gates House, 63/64 The Avenue, Southampton SO17 1XS