Question

I am running on a virtual server on pair.com . the testenv script says the user is nobody.

Before I implemented the solution at the very end of RcsNonStrictLocking my topic.txt,v files showed they were being locked by root (the files were being created by nobody).

So I implmented the USER and LOGNAME env variable solution, but I still have some problems.

the topic.txt,v are now being strict locked by nobody. And I can edit files fine. But the revision number never increases. This means I can't back out of a change

• TWiki version: Dec 2001
• Web server: Apache
• Server OS: FreeBSD
• Web browser: galeon
• Client OS: linux

-- MichaelDeBeer - 08 May 2002

New topics get these permissions

• TestTopic.txt,v -r--r--r--
• TestTopic.txt -rw-r--r--
• TestTopic.lock -rw-rw-rw-

-- MichaelDeBeer - 07 May 2002

Who actually owns these files now? Try doing the following in each web directory: chmod 666 * .??* (the second argument catches the .changes file, which is necessary for WebNotify.)

This enables the 'nobody' user, as well as everyone else with a CGI script on that server (see SecureSetup) to write these files.

-- RichardDonkin - 08 May 2002

The new topics (which I create via /edit/) are owned by nobody. The older ones (which came from untarring them) are owned by 'madebeer' (my username).

The directory is owned by madebeer and has perms drwxrwsrwx The symptoms are the same, no matter who owns the file.

Should my next step be to try to add more logging to see what RCS is doing? Or should I disable strict locking?

Thanks for responding.

-- MichaelDeBeer - 08 May 2002

Did you do the chmod command? This applies to the files not the directory. If not, have a look at TWikiDebugging and post any Apache error log details.

Also, you need to remove the 's' bit from the directory - this constrains it in some ways that may interfere with things, see the ls(1) and chmod(1) man pages.

-- RichardDonkin - 08 May 2002

I did the chmod command. It did not allow me to change any of the files owned by 'nobody' (I own the directory, but not the files within it). I'm on a hosted machine, so I don't have root access.

I removed the 's' bit. This allowed a version to increase in the existing files -- but only once. After that, they would not increase. So it is something in the permissions.

I have attached a debug-log-1.txt that shows what rcs is trying to do.

Answer

Ah - I forgot about the 'not being nobody' issue - solution is to use TWikiDebugging's CGI-Telnet, which runs as a CGI script and lets you run chmod etc as that user.

If your provider uses suexec or similar (see SecureSetup) this is all a lot easier - however, this doesn't seem very common and certainly isn't how your account is set up.

-- RichardDonkin - 09 May 2002

I did the chmod command using CGI-TELNET. This worked partially. It changed the permissions. And then the revision number would go up by one.

In rewriting the files, however, twiki would change the perms for the datafiles for the topic, so that TestLock.txt,v was not writable. For for example ls -l TestLock.*

-rw-rw-rw- 1 nobody users 16 May 13 18:16 TestLock.lock
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody users 84 May 13 18:16 TestLock.txt 
-r--r--r-- 1 nobody users 671 May 13 18:16 TestLock.txt,v

When I edited the file again, the topic was changed, but the version number did not increase. So I think I somehow need to force Twiki to chmod TestLock.txt,v as write-able by the owner. Does that make sense? How do I do that?

-- MichaelDeBeer - 13 May 2002

The version number does not increase if the same person edits the same topic again with one hour (by default). This is to avoid unecessary revs when reediting a topic to make more changes. Wait one hour, then save again to see if the rev gets increased. Check the TWiki.cfg settings for details.

RCS sets the -rw-r--r-- and -r--r--r-- permissions with the cgi-bin user, so all looks normal.

-- PeterThoeny - 14 May 2002

Yes, TWiki is working now.

Thanks for Richard and Peter for your help.

-- MichaelDeBeer - 14 May 2002

Aha! Your explanation about version numbers not increasing immediately answers my question. I installed it on MacOS X last night and, after figuring out how to change the user to "www", I was still seeing problems with version numbers going up. Now I know why. I'm going to update RCSConfigurationOnMacOSX with this information since I read that document about 20 times last night and I'm sure others will want to know what's going on.

-- JoelSumner - 22 Jan 2003