[CentOS] perplexing permissions issue

[Dave]

Hi,	 
	Thanks for your reply. Your suggestion did it, along with changing
the umask value for the ftp server, it had to be set to 113:002 rather than
133:002.
	I hope this finally solves the issue.
	Thanks everyone for your help.
	Dave.

-----Original Message-----
From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf
Of Filipe Brandenburger
Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 11:33 AM
To: CentOS mailing list
Subject: Re: [CentOS] perplexing permissions issue

Hi,

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 11:03, Dave<dave.mehler at gmail.com> wrote:
>        I'm running CentOS 5.3 and it runs an apache web server. The 
> permissions on the web data directory in this case 
> /var/www/secure/data are set to 4775 owner of apache group of webdev.

I believe what you want is 2775, the first "2" is the set-gid group, it will
make files created in that directory inherit that group.

> I was under the impression
> that any file then placed in that directory would have a owner of 
> apache and a group of webdev

No, that's not how that works... You cannot force the user ownership of a
file to change, only the group ownership. The set-uid bit on a directory
doesn't do anything (AFAIK), only the set-gid bit has the effect of making
files created in that directory inherit that group.

> permissions of 664.

That is actually controlled by the "umask", which is set by each
user/program. In RHEL/CentOS, if your primary group matches your username,
your umask will be set to 002, which is the one that will create files with
664 permissions, which is the one you want.

> content permissions are set to 664 but owner and group membership are 
> that of the user who added the files not apache and webdev. The issue 
> is further compounded when a user logs in via ftp and adds files or 
> folders. They are owned by the ftp user and group.

Fix the directory permissions from 4775 to 2775 and the group of files will
be set to "webdev" as you want them to.

Make sure the umask will be 002 (you might have to configure that on your
FTP server too) and files will be writable by any member of group "webdev",
so although the files won't all have the same owner, they will all be
writable by any other members of that same group.

HTH,
Filipe
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