Newbie mistake...

[Severian]

I decided to stop giving my money to Microsoft and work with Linux. So I'm new to the Linux world, though I know a couple of things about computers. But today I was setting up an Apache/MySQL/PHP combo in Mandriva and somehow I messed it up.

I had the default web page working fine so I decided I wanted to customize it. I tried to edit index.shtml but I didn't have permission so I chown'ed the /var/www/html directory to user:user. I was able to update the index file, but the browser started giving a 403 Forbidden Error I chown'ed the directory back to apache:apache but I still get 403.

I've tried everything I can think of. I've read a few manuals, but they all want to play with the config file. Since I broke it without the config file, it seems like it should be fixable without the config file.

Any thoughts out there?

[serz]

How are the permissions of /var/www/html?

ls -ld /var/www/html

Also, how are the permissions of that index.html?

[Severian]

Hi Serz.

Well, in order to learn the system more I just went ahead and reinstalled the OS. It helped with a couple of issues and now the web access is fine again.

So, to avoid making the same mistake twice, here's the question: What is the easiest way to give a user permission to add files to the var/www/html and still maintain Apache's function?

When I used the Permissions from the control panel previously I gave user 'thomas' rights to everything. Magically that produced the 403 error, even after chown'ing the user back to apache.

Should I only be moving files in there as Root? Should I update the config file? Should I try giving 'thomas' permission again?

(Owner of var/www/html is apache:apache, owner of index.shtml is root:root)

Thanks!

[Cabhan]

Well, what I'm thinking is you could change all the files in that directory to be under ownership of the "apache" group, and then add thomas to that group. Should work, I think? To do so, you would do the following as root:

cd /var/www/
chown -R :apache html
groupmod -a thomas apache

This way, only users in the "apache" group could write to that folder, but thomas is a member of that group.

Just make sure that the group permissions are set to writable. To do this if it's not already done, you could run:

chmod -R g+w /var/www/html/

That's how I'd do it, and it should work.

[Severian]

I'll give that a shot.

Thanks for the advice, guys!

[nvhanh]

Hi!
I am a newbie on LINUX, I have just installed MDK for a week! I only use (La)TeX to write my document. But I don't know how can I install tetex 3.0 on my system. Please help me!
Thank for reading this message.

[serz]

Hi!
I am a newbie on LINUX, I have just installed MDK for a week! I only use (La)TeX to write my document. But I don't know how can I install tetex 3.0 on my system. Please help me!
Thank for reading this message.

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