[pmwiki-users] Permissions puzzle

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 11:54:01AM -0400, Henrik wrote:
> I use PmWiki for buckets of websites on a single Unix webserver account. 
> All was going well until my hosting company upgraded my shared hosting 
> server to PHP 5.2.1. A good thing to upgrade, but all of a sudden all my 
> wikis broke, with "unable to obtain .flock file" (among other things).
> 
> After several days of (in the end) pointless dialog with my host service 
> company (webserve.ca), I ended up having to change rights on all wiki.d 
> and uploads directories from 755 to 777. I presume this means that 
> whereas PHP previously had owner rights, it now has none, and therefore 
> needs public access to write directories.
> 
> Does anyone know where to look for a configuration change on my host 
> that would make this happen? 

I'm not sure that a PHP configuration change alone can explain the 
entire issue.  It would help to know the ownerships for files created 
before the change versus the ownerships of the files being created 
after the change -- I suspect that the userid also changed in
the process somewhere.

Were the directories really 755 permissions (as opposed to
775) before the upgrade occurred?  If the directories were 755 
and the files created by PmWiki were 644, that would imply that
previous PmWiki (and PHP) were running under your userid instead
of the "nobody" or "www" user.  

Anyway, based on your description it looks like the PHP user may
have changed somehow... but it's still odd.

> If useful, you can see the php 
> configuration at dufferinpark.ca/phpinfo.php.

Actually, that page says you're running 5.0.5, not 5.2.1 .

> My web host BTW proffered the rather desperate theory that someone had 
> hacked my account and systematically altered permissions on all my wiki 
> directories (there are at least a couple of dozen). This is not true. I 
> checked<grin>.

All of this gets down to a question of file and directory ownerships -- 
which is why it's important to know the before/after to be able
to say what might have happened or changed.

Pm