help with the administrator file access panel

[blackhawk]

I installed oscmax 2.025 on ubuntu and everything works great except for adding files under the administrator file access panel. The panel that shows the dropdown of files to add (on the right hand side) just doesn't show up at all in my admin.

the funny thing is that if i take an oscmax project i built in windows vista and copy that folder over to my linux system and run it, i can see the drop down to add files to admin. I wonder if this has something to do with my read-write permissions in ubuntu. anyone got any ideas for proper installation under unbuntu?

oh yeah i did a file comparison on admin_files.php between the 2 sites and its the same. my directory for oscmax is under the /opt directory.

thanks

[blackhawk]

its a user groups issue with ubuntu - by default all files and folders downloaded from the oscmax package gets owned by 'root' - when in reality, every user by default on ubuntu is not a root user, although it says we're in the admin group. so i just gotta figure out how to avoid the system from assigning oscmax to root and assign it to another group...

[michael_s]

Files will not default to root ownership with ubuntu - they are owned by whatever user creates them on the server. As long as you login as a regular user and do not sudo to root, your files will be owned by the regular user that you logged in as.

[blackhawk]

my apologies, the problem is when after uncompressing the oscmax zip file, i then COPY the catalog folder to var/www or /opt. thats when all the fuss begins. so is it a good practice to have our local development web hosting directory at /var/www or /opt (for lampp),? or should we have our directory somewhere else?

when i ran the var/www/demosite/catalog/install.php file - everything but the configure.php page was created. as a result i have to manually go in and create configure.php under my includes directory AND assign it its proper permissions after doing a sudo su command. its a killer...

but thats only half the problem, i still can't figure out why administrator file access page doesnt show me the files in my admin directory to add....

i got feeling this is all connected, but i just dont know how...

[blackhawk]

hmm...the group that my user account is in, only has the ability to "access files", not create or delete files. Does that sound right, or should my group have the ability to create and delete files initially? perhaps this is a starting point...

[blackhawk]

I fixed my issue!!!
Under Ubuntu 10, go to the terminal to assign your account name (USER) to have access to var/www like this...

$ sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www

Then after downloading oscmax, unzip it, copy the catalog folder over to your web host directory. Then click for permissions on the catalog folder. your user should already have "create and delete files" access. But manually change your group permissions to the same thing (create and delete files) AND check box to apply the same rules for the files inside that catalog folder. Then repeat the same process to the folders one level below the catalog folder. Then install oscmax!

var/www/demosite/catalog/install/

After its done installing, you should see the home page and admin login page. thats because we just gave our account access to "automatically" create the configure.php file under the var/www directory, which by default is root assigned! Folder permissions is a whole new world in Ubuntu. This also fixed my original issue with my files not showing up under the administrator file access panel!

bh

[michael_s]

My whole point is that you will not need to chown any files if you are logged in to the terminal as the correct user instead of as root.

Say the user is 'blackhawk'

As long as you login as 'blackhawk' and not as 'root' when you unzip the archive it will be owned by blackhawk. It really is very simple and a matter of using best practices. You should always do your file operations as a regular user.

[blackhawk]

oh no doubt. I agreed with you 4 posts up. I got what you said and realized I made a mistake in my initial post above, thinking everything that downloads to ubuntu is owned by root.

The point of my last post though, was to make that our regular group accounts don't automatically have "create and delete" file access in ubuntu's filesystem portion, such as in the /var and /opt directories. So if we put oscmax files in there, we have to adjust the group permissions. thats all.

[michael_s]

I follow, but my point is you shouldn't be doing it that way. The permissions are set the way they are for a very good reason, and you should not be changing them when there is a perfectly viable, more secure option.

You should be creating the necessary user directories above /var and only allowing write permissions for the user on that specific user directory. For instance /var/apache/blackhawk, and the user blackhawk would only have read/write permissions on the blackhawk directory tree.

[blackhawk]

and the user blackhawk would only have read/write permissions on the  blackhawk directory tree.

...while every other folder outside that directory is owned and controlled by the root user?


Can the virtual host names in apache2 still reach our oscmax locations if they are not in the /var/www directory? I assumed it was important to keep everything in the /var/www directory (i.e. /var/www/mysite) as upose to the /var/[whatever] directory. Guess I was mistaken. I'll give your technique a shot.

Also if its just the user that has write permissions and not the group, then how can php files automatically run to create stuff, like creating the configure.php file that comes with oscmax? I wasnt able to read or write to files before when my group setting was set to "access files." As a result I couldnt add or remove php files from my oscmax admin panel. I'll look over my settings again but I'm just sharing what happened with my default user/group settings.