The Tech Bench: A Script for Fixing File Permissions

suPHP and FastCGI require files and folders to have a specific set of permissions/ownership different from other handlers. Without these permissions set correctly you will see a lot of errors such as: “403 Forbidden”, “500 Internal Server Error”, or simply generic errors that commonly have the word ‘permission’ in them.

It can be very time consuming to track down and check file permissions across a whole server. Luckily, fixing permissions and ownership on a server running  cPanel can be scripted. One of the members of our MST, Colin Roche-Dutch, created a simple script for ServInt called ‘fixperms’ that you can wget to any cPanel server. Simply run the fixperms script, specifying the user (or all users), and the errors disappear.  It is a good generic fix if you cannot find your permission problem, or if you have just switched your handler and need a quick way to change every user account on the server. Read more

The Tech Bench: File Permissions and Ownership

After last week’s discussion of PHP handlers, we thought we’d use this week’s Tech Bench to discuss the ins and outs of file permissions and ownership.

The Numbering Scheme

File permissions are often noted as a three digit number. This number is the binary shorthand used to classify the owner, group and public permissions for the file. The value farthest to the left is for the file owner, the middle value is for the group, and the value on the right is for anyone who does not fit into the owner or group and in most circumstances should be the most restricted.

Read more