Giving users same rights as root

[tristanlee85]

I have 2 users on my account: root and tristan are the only 2 I use. Since I runa webserver, I use the GUI of RH 9 to edit my documents. I always login under 'tristan' because I've customized that for myself. WHen I go to edit my webpages (/var/www/), I get a read-only error because I am not root. So, I have to logout, login as root, change the files there, logout, login as 'tristan' and then go on with my business.

Is there any way to give 'tristan' permission to folders such as /var/ and/opt/ ? If not, is there a quick way to switch between 'tristan' and 'root' within the GUI without having to logout?

[big_k105]

what you could do is change the place where your htdoc file is locatation where you can edit them or you could go into root and then chmod and chown the files so that your user can use them.

chown -R user wwwdirectory

and

chmod -R 755 wwwdirectory

i believe this is the right syntax for this if it doenst work you could try using the man pages for chown and chmod
this is a better way around this then giving your user root permisions

[tristanlee85]

Thanx. I had tried

chmod 777 /var/www/html

before I asked you, but that didn't help. This isn't the first time I've used linux, but the first time I've had to set permissions and more "in-depth" proceedures than I have ever done before.

What exactly is the difference in chmod and chown...and why did I need to use -R?

[big_k105]

the -R makes every file and directory in side of the directory you are chmodding change permissions too. with out it only the maid directory will change
and chown changed the ownership of the files and directories. chmod only changes the permission to read, write, and execute the files

[tristanlee85]

Bringing back one of my old old threads. Is it possible that 'chown' could cause issues with my server working? I mean, I recently did the following command:

chown -R tristan /opt/lampp

That's the entire folder for the server. Now I seem to be having major server issues. Is there anyway to "undo" the 'chown' command?

[Roxoff]

Bringing back one of my old old threads. Is it possible that 'chown' could cause issues with my server working? I mean, I recently did the following command:

chown -R tristan /opt/lampp

That's the entire folder for the server. Now I seem to be having major server issues. Is there anyway to "undo" the 'chown' command?

You cant 'undo' it, but imposing that user as owner of the files can limit some applications from accessing those directories and files. A good way to try and claw some of this back is to use something like:

chown -R root:users /opt/lampp

Of course, if the application 'lampp' has its own user 'cos it runs a service as itself, then the fix could be as simple as:

chown -R lampp /opt/lampp

I've never really had problems with permissions while I've been administrating my own Linux systems, they're quite logical, and it pays to spend some time in understanding them fully. The only time I get confused is when I forget who gets access to what...