Question

I have the following error from my Configure under LogFiles .

1) {WarningFileName} = /var/www/twiki/data/warn%DATE%

Error

/var/www/twiki/data/ is not writable Though I have the following permission for this directory drwxr-xr-x 25 1000 users 4096 May 15 07:11 /var/www/twiki/data and I have pruposely set the permission to 777 for the above file.

Error

/var/www/twiki/data/ is not writable Though I have the following permission for this directory drwxr-xr-x 25 1000 users 4096 May 15 07:11 /var/www/twiki/data and I have pruposely set the permission to 777 for the above file.

Any idea why this keeps complaining?

Environment

-- KarunNithi - 08 Jul 2008

Answer

It complains because the directory /var/www/twiki/data is not writeable by the web server's user id. TWiki will try to use new log files per month, so even if you set a permission of 777 to the current month's log file, it will fail to open a log file for next month. To do so, the web server's user id needs write permission to /var/www/twiki/data. If, however, you do not use a %DATE% construct in your log file name and always are using a fixed file name, you may safely ignore this warning.

-- HaraldJoerg - 08 Jul 2008

Dear Harald,

Thanks for the reply. But I have the following ownership for this directory:

drwxr-xr-x 25 1000 users 4096 May 15 07:11 /var/www/twiki/data

So should this be owned by apache?

I see some of the directories are owned by apache:apache whereas some are owned by 1000:users as shown below.

$ cd /var/www/twiki
 
$ ls -lat
drwxr-xr-x 4 1000 users 4096 Jul 7 20:07 lib
drwxr-xr-x 2 1000 users 12288 Jul 7 18:35 templates
drwxr-xr-x 2 1000 users 4096 Jul 7 18:35 tools
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Jul 7 18:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 apache apache 4096 Jun 30 13:24 bin
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 May 21 19:26 ..
drwxrwxr-x 2 apache apache 4096 May 21 19:26 extras
drwxr-xr-x 2 apache apache 4096 May 21 19:26 locale
drwxr-xr-x 5 apache apache 4096 May 21 19:26 working
drwxr-xr-x 25 1000 users 4096 May 15 07:11 data
drwxr-xr-x 24 1000 users 4096 May 15 07:11 pub

-- KarunNithi - 09 Jul 2008

/var/www/twiki/data and /var/www/twiki/pub and all their subdirectories should be owned by apache:apache, whereas /var/www/twiki/bin would better be owned by some system administrator. A numerical uid of 1000 which does not correspond to a login name is considered a security hazard in traditional Linux environments because at some day in the future someone might add a login with exactly that uid. The new login would then own parts of your TWiki code.

For a detailed guideline on how to get access rights right, read TWiki.SettingFileAccessRightsLinuxUnix.

-- HaraldJoerg - 11 Jul 2008

I changed the ownership as apache:apache and the problem vanished.

-- KarunNithi - 11 Jul 2008