By armanschwarz on

I've been using drupal happily for over a year now, but recently I've been getting a flood of errors every time I run cron. I've documented these problems already: #960720: Getting a flood of errors relating to permissions with every cron run and #960702: Getting a flood of errors relating to permissions with every cron run but haven't received any replies. So I want to ask my question differently:

Assuming all my file attributes/permissions are wrong, and assuming I don't understand any of the SSH/CHMOD technobabble that one receives when trying to solve this problem with google, how on earth do I fix all the broken file attributes in my default folder??

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

bhosmer’s picture

bhosmer commented

Assuming your file permissions ARE wrong, you will have to indulge in all of the "technobabble" to fix your permissions.

You need to ssh or ftp into your server and change the file permissions.

Basically, you need to log into your server in a way that you can access the files on the server. You do this through SSH or FTP depending on what your host is set up to use. You might be able to use both or only one. This is kind of like an old Dos prompt on your machine, except you are doing it remotely.

Then you use CHMOD to change the permissions of those files and ownership.

Instead of a command-line interface, you can use Filezilla or some other graphical interface to accomplish the same thing.

http://www.radarearth.com

armanschwarz’s picture

armanschwarz commented

Yes I usually use Cpanel because I get 550 errors when I try to change permissions with filezilla. Then what? What do I change them to? I get about 100 errors like this every few hours:

unlink(sites/default/files/js/js_b3ecc8c8e37552ec9c73c5ffb031eb6c.js) [<a href='function.unlink'>function.unlink</a>]: Permission denied in /public_html/includes/file.inc on line 471.

These .js files all have 664 permissions, and the js folder itself has the permissions set to 775. I can set the permissions of the js folder, but does that affect the permissions of all files in it?

It would be great if someone could just tell me how to set permissions up correctly without using chmod!

bhosmer’s picture

bhosmer commented

I did in my other post. Download a graphical ftp interface like filezilla, then select all the files you want to change permissions for. Right click and change the permissions. Look and see who owns the files you are changing. Some files you don't need to mess with and don't change permissions of everything to 775.

To answer your folder question, no. You can have different permissions for a folder and a file contained within that folder. Your errors most likely are because the files are owned by a script or php.
This will be shown by and owner of "99" or something else like that.

Be careful if you mass change your entire site. You could make everything writable and accessible by anyone and create security problem.

Unfortunately, there isn't a simple answer for your question. Web servers have permissions and you will have to learn how they work and how to talk to them.

Could you recap what issue you are having?

Someone actually posted a reply to your issue:

#2
Posted by xjm on November 9, 2010 at 9:55am new
Priority: critical » normal

I get these as well. It's likely not a permissions problem so much as an owner/group problem. If you check the owner and group of these files, you will probably see that both are the web server's user. Makes sense since these files are created automatically by Drupal. So, other users don't have permission to delete them.

For example, when I run a drush command that flushes the cache as my own user, I get the error messages for all the optimized css and js files. If I do it as root, or sudo it as the web server's user, there are no errors and the files are properly deleted.

If the errors appear on a cron run, I'm guessing it might have something to do with which user runs cron.

The errors are merely an annoyance, really. They're just old CSS/JS cache files, so it's nothing to worry about unless you're running out of disk space.

I think you may be going in the wrong direction changing file permissions. This seems more like a cron issue and who is running cron.

http://www.radarearth.com

armanschwarz’s picture

armanschwarz commented

Thanks for the help, but how do I check the owner of a file? How do I change "who" runs cron? I can't see anything in filezilla that makes a mention of the file owners...