Well, I use CentOS, so the exact steps are different, but when I copy files into the webserver root directory using e.g. the root user, I then have to do:

cd /var/www/html
chown apache:apache -R ./*
chmod -R 644 ./*

It hasn't broken my system yet :)

In general, the webserver root directory is pretty meaningless to the Linux system overall. I suspect you broke SSH before when changing file permissions because SSH is very sensitive regarding permissions, as if certain files are too public, it can undermine the security of the system. In my experience, you can change the ownership and permissions of most files and directories in Linux without problem, but there are some exceptions, some as /

I would be pretty confident that changing the ownership and permissions to /var/www won't melt your server *or* give Andy a nervous breakdown :)

Paul

ludo1960@lycos.co.uk wrote:

Many thanks for your help,

So I am on the right track then?

When you say :

"something like:

cd /var/www
chown www-data:www-data -R ./*
chmod 644 -R ./*"

Is this guaranteed to melt my server and give Andy at Bitfolk a nervous breakdown?

Cheers,

Cliff....

---

> From:: Paul Lewis <bitfolk@pjlewis.org>
> To: ludo1960@lycos.co.uk
> Subject: Re: [bitfolk] Still got 503 error
> Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:42:32 +0000

In general you would want the apache user to own the web server folders. In your case, you want to do something like:

cd /var/www
chown www-data:www-data -R ./*
chmod 644 -R ./*

This will change the ownership of all files under /var/www to User:www-data and Group:www-data, and set the permissions to rw-r--r-- (you should avoid execute (x) permissions in webserver folders where possibly).

Hope that helps,

Paul

ludo1960@lycos.co.uk wrote:

Hello Bitfolkers,

Back to my 503 error, I wrote to the domain module creator http://drupal.org/node/330563 and the only thing I can come up with (after checking my Drupal permissions is the Ownership of my Server root. At the moment
it is User:root Group:root  that doesn't sound right to me. I also have the user www-data in Group www-data (from apache I presume) that has the home directory of /var/www (server root) Could confusion over the Ownership of the /var/www directory be causing me poblems? The last time I tried altering Users and Ownerships I fried my server, thought best I should ask before I start mucking about again!

These are my suspicions, it will be interesting to see if I am correct or barking up the wrong tree..again!!

Cheers,

Cliff..

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