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Permissions - Novell/Linux help

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by rouse 1 view

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I've got Netware Brain Cramp Syndrome and can't seem to get a grip on permissions with Linux.
I've setup Linux 7.0 on a small network and am running Apache server. I'd like to move some web pages from a windows box to the \var\www directory that Apache serves up, so we can use it as an intanet, but cannot figure how to do so. Possibly you can tell me where I go wrong here?
I create a 'www' GROUP with linuxconfig and add myself as into the Alternate Members. The Home Base Directory for group www is /var/www. In the USER Accounts, I also add myself to the supplementary group - www. With Samba, I can browse my home directory, but cannot see the /var/www/ directory.
Ok - With Novell, I'd just create a www group and give the group accessto the folder(/var/www). When I add a user to that group, then bang! they inherit the permissions.
I think my confusion will only make sense to someone familiar with Netadmin. If the graphical interface is lacking, I can hammer the solution directly to the appropriate .conf

3 replies

by cpfeiffe

There are several ways to accomplish this. First the samba issue: If you can't see /var/www it probably means you are not sharing it through samba. Home directories are default shares, but others must be set up in the samba config file or with swat (web interface for samba) if you installed it. Once you can see the directory you still may not be able to put files into it as the user or a member of the www group unless you have set the permissions on the directory correctly.

If you do an ls -al on /var you should see www. All the way to the left you should see d?????????. The questions will be rwxrwxrwx if you have read, write, and execute permission on the directory as the owner, group and everyone in that respective order. If you don't have the identified permission the letter will be replaced with -. You need write as the owner and probably the group for what you are trying to do so the first two w's need to be on. You can use the man pages for chmod to determine how to set these. You should also look at the man pages for chown and verify the owner and group of the directory. The www directory may not be owned by who you want to own it, it would have been owned by whoever created it.

Hope this helps a little from the Unix side.

by shanghai sam

Ok, Thanks 1000k & you get the points. Hope I can help you someday.
Your last sentence clicked. Changing ownership of the /var/www and the directories under it to the www group, (which I am member of) gave me the write access. So I reckon I'll add the users who need priviledges to that group.
My hangup is that root creates it when installed, so he owns it. As root, I gave the www group access to it, but no-go. Only when I changed ownership to www does www get priviledges. So what happens if I want to give another organization unit write priviledges, let's say accounting (god forbid)? Surely I don't have to change ownership to accounting. Or will I have to add each accounting member to the www group? Chown is a weird concept to me (netware talking).

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