Question

I am the administrator of our TWiki since Dec 2001. We have installed TWiki in the home directory of the wiki administrator (userID "wiki", group "wiki"). Our Apache-Web-Server runs with UID "www-adm" / group "wwwserv". All wiki files had UID/group "wiki/wiki" originally. New topic files *.txt have UID/group www-adm/wwwserv and only read permission for group wwwserv. UID wiki is member of group wwwserv. As a consequence, I (UID wiki) cannot even apply chmod to such topic files, nor can I use a texteditor to change their content (which in some cases is desirable in order to remove meta data, e.g. for attachment files).

I suppose that in other TWiki installations the situation is principally similar. It would be very helpful then for wiki administrators if new or modified topic files would be created with write permission for group.

I can see only the following alternatives:

1. The wiki administrator has root permission or knows the www-adm password, which is undesirable in many cases.
2. The web-server administrator must install certain features of the Apache server (suEXEC,...) to enable cgi-procedures to run under a specific userID (e.g., "wiki"). My experience is that web-server administrators don't like this solution, either, namely for security reasons and since Apache warns to be very cautious when installing these features.

• TWiki version: 01-Dec-2001
• Web server: Sun
• Server OS: Solaris 7
• Web browser: IE6
• Client OS: NT4

-- KlausGuenther - 28 Jan 2002

Answer

This is a typical problem with files on a web hosting server, where users do not have the permission to change files created by the cgi-bin user. There is a workaround, read Codev.TWikiOnSourceForge.

-- PeterThoeny - 28 Jan 2002

I don't know Perl, but isn't it possible to enforce write permission for "group" from within the TWiki Perl scripts? IMHO that would be the simplest solution.

-- KlausGuenther - 29 Jan 2002

This is the spec of RCS, it makes checked in files read only, also for the owner. So the text files have permission 444 (-r--r--r--) and the repository files have 644 (-rw-r--r--). You could hack Store.pm to change that after each check-in, but this is not recommended.

-- PeterThoeny - 29 Jan 2002