Errors installing Joomla Plugins (Ownership)

[ReneNL]

I'm an end user having a problem on installing Joomla Virtual Market on a webserver using Direct Admin 1.37.0. One of the errors: "failed to open stream: Permission denied". Joomla itself installs without any problem.

When I connect to the public folder using FTP, I can see the account 'FTP' is owner of the public_html folder and subfolders/ files:

(drwxr-xr-x 19 ftp ftp 4096 Jan 28 14:49 public_html)

However, when exploring the Direct Admin Portal with my admin account assigned by my hosting provider, every file and folder seems owned (or should I say permitted?) by my Direct Admin administrator account.

Question 1: What's the difference in this view? I'm not a Unix admin, but I think FTP is OWNER, while my admin account just has PERMISSIONS to the folder from a Windows perspective

Question 2: I've found some old threads about cron jobs chown-ing the folder, but is this still the case?

ref:
http://www.directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16625
http://www.directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15851

Question 3: What should my hosting provider do to permanently chown the folders to my admin account?

I hope someone can help me.

Regards, Rene

 

[nobaloney]

You haven't given us enough information to help you. Specifically, what does this:

However, when exploring the Direct Admin Portal with my admin account assigned by my hosting provider, every file and folder seems owned (or should I say permitted?) by my Direct Admin administrator account.

mean?

We need at the very least the domain name, the owner name, and a way to reproduce the error.

The problem is dependent upon how PHP is set up on the server. If you can get your hosting company to add the important information to this thread we'll help them as best we're able to determine the problem.

Otherwise this may help: tell the hosting company that for this to work for you they should switch from running PHP as mod_php to either suPHP or mod_ruid2, and then to change the ownership and rights on the server so everything is owned by and with permissions given to, the site owner account name.

I wouldn't follow either of those two very old threads you posted; a lot has changed since then.

Note, though that one of them refers to adding a functionality to DirectAdmin to allow you to change the ownership of files back to your username... that has already been added to DirectAdmin and if your hosting company updates DirectAdmin you have that feature.

However it's as likely to stop the plugin from running as help it.

Jeff

 

[ReneNL]

Hi Jeff,

This is what I meant: when I view the ownership of the files and folders in an ftp client like WS_FTP, I see this: (drwxr-xr-x 19 ftp ftp 4096 Jan 28 14:49 public_html). So 'ftp' seems to be owner. However when I'm in the DirectAdmin Portal and I go to 'File Manager' the UID and GID have the same name as my DirectAdmin admin account. How is this possible? I would suspect UID and GID to be 'ftp' also. (If you don't mind I prefer not to mention the sitename nor admin name since they're not mine.)

When I use the option 'Reset Owner' in the File Manager, I don't see any change in the FTP client. So is there some other level of ownership within DirectAdmin or something?

When I set all permissions to 777 it's solves my problems, but reverting back to 755 recursively puts all the files to 755 also (instead of 644). Besides my website will be vulnerable during this operation. So that's not a good option.

To test the scenario: install Joomla out of the box, but make sure your DirectAdmin admin account is not the same as the owner of the files. Install Virtual Market. After installing VM (which claims to be succesful) select 'Go directly to the shop'. The next screen will be a critical error stating some core files are missing.

Another interesting piece of information: when installating Joomla the second step warns: configuration.php writeable: No

I hope this information suffices.

Regards, Rene

 

[nobaloney]

Windows FTP clients always show ftp as the owner. I don't recall whether or not Linux FTP clients do or not, and I'm not taking the time to check.

To see the true owners of the file use the File Management facility in DirectAdmin.

My guess is that you're trying what I call mixed management. Presuming your server runs php as mod_php, then it's running php as your site as apache, but you're uploading as your admin username. Not compatible.

There are lots of posts on these forums on how to make this work, and the DirectAdmin file manager allows you some flexibility the ftp client doesn't.

But you may need the flexibility you can only get from a command line, and I'm guessing you're a client of a hosting company, not a DirectAdmin admin, and therefore don't have root shell access, which is what you need to make changes.

Personally I only support PHP as CGI, and mod_ruid2; mod_php really doesn't have the flexibility CMS systems such as Joomla need.

I've read and will respond to your PM, but there's not much I can do for you short of offering you a properly configurd server; you may need to get your webhost involved.

Jeff