Re: php, files, ownership....(was file manipulation)

I just sent an email just before reading this, to the developers I report to. I suggested that we take out the nice little feature I worked so hard on. I dont think it would be benificial to people Im writing it for, if it doesn't work for a great number of people who have their websites on a shared server. Oh well, back to the drawing board for my next plan to take over the world.... :) Thanks Richard Lynch wrote:

You *CAN* do that with PHP as CGI wrapped with suexec... But you lose performance, and you'll have to convince the ISP to install that as a second mime-type with a different extension... They'll need to read the suexec docs at http://apache.org first and foremost. (Doing suexec incorrectly is quite dangerous) Other option is to chown or chmod the files to allow nobody to do what nobody needs to do -- Of course, that opens those files up for any other users on the shared server to mess with, and it's probably easier for an external hacker to gain "nobody" access than a real user. Safety is relative. How critical are these files, and how much do you trust fellow users on a shared resource web-server? You could also write some world-executable shell scripts that provide "nobody" with very specific actions they can do to/with the files -- You want to write that script as limited and carefully as possible so that *ONLY* the things you want to happen can happen. Bottom line: Unless you go hard-core with suexec, anything you set up can be figured out and potentially abused by any fellow users on the ISP. -- WARNING richard@zend.com address is an endangered species -- Use ceo@l-i-e.com Wanna help me out? Like Music? Buy a CD: http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm Volunteer a little time: http://chatmusic.com/volunteer.htm ----- Original Message ----- From: Gerard Samuel <trini0@optonline.net> Newsgroups: php.general To: PHP <php-general@lists.php.net> Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2001 7:24 PM Subject: php, files, ownership....(was file manipulation)

Ok, I found out what was causing some of the people who were using my script and have it fail. They are on a shared server and apache is being run as user nobody, so therefore the script is being run as nobody. But the the files has to have user ownership foo foo. Is it at all possible to have a script run as one user and create files as another. Dont know if it is even safe?? Or could you point me in another direction? Thanks