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Showing posts with the label permissions

Assigning default ownership to all new files in a directory

Getting the hang of Linux file-system permissions can be tricky for beginners. I still have problems every now and again translating symbolic permission notation to octal permission notation and back again. One common scenario which can be complicated to enact in practice is the creation of default permissions for files inside of given directories. Although not a direct translation, in Windows this sort of functionality is usually implemented by selecting the "Allow propagation on child objects" setting when viewing Security Properties for a directory. But how to get this done in Linux? The preferred approach is the use of Access Control Lists using setfacl . Since Linux kernel 2.6, the acl flag is enabled by default with most standard filesystems. There's already several solid explanations for how to use Linux ACLs . But, there are scenarios in which this can be difficult or impossible to implement; using exotic filesystems or older kernels, etc. Or you just might find

Changes to Helicon Ape's http.conf Not Recognized? Check Permissions

Helicon Ape is a great tool that allows people to stop complaining that Windows does not provide support for .htaccess, or for those who need URL rewriting in pre-Windows 2008 servers. For maximum confusion, Helicon names its configuration file httpd.conf like Apache. I made some modifications to the logging verbosity in that file, helping out an admin who hadn't realized that debug-level verbosity on redirect logging results not just in poor performance from the additional overhead needed to write to a file each time a URL is mod'd, but in a huge file that will quickly overwhelm available storage. Attempting to save http.conf resulted in errors because it was in use by a process so I copied my modified file to the desktop, renamed the existing conf file and copied my copy back into the Helicon configuration directory.  My changes weren't applied. The syntax was correct in my changes and Helicon kept processing redirects. Sure enough I compared permissions on the tw

MySQL root Grants Broken Following a phpmyadmin Install in Windows

So this is a weird one. I recently installed phpmyadmin 3.5.1 in a MySQL 5.1 / IIS 7.5 environment. Everything was going well until I realized that following the installation (which was fully functional) I could not login to MySQL (from the CLI) without referencing the hostname (-h flag). I figured that maybe the .sql script included with the installer messed with my grants, but a quick show grants revealed I still had the same permissions granted to root as when I started. So I figured that I would update the grants on root to what was displayed in show grants just in case. This produced an insufficient permissions error even though root had "full" privileges. To resolve this I added skip-grant-tables to my.ini, restarted the mysql service, logged in as root, flushed privileges, and again updated grants to what was displayed in "show grants". I then removed skip-grant-tables and restarted, and I was again able to login locally. I'm still not certain what caus