During a phase of system testing on server c1, in the new datacentre, an interesting problem was discovered.<\/p>\n
Using WordPress as the template (so the results could be applied to Drupal installations – and any other of those .php-related content management systems), we discovered that permissions on high-level directories were not being replicated down to low-level directories.<\/p>\n
This meant a loss of function (where that function relied on scripts that are installed in those low-level directories by the vanilla application).<\/p>\n
In WordPress and Drupal, for example, uploading media of any type wouldn’t work.<\/p>\n
This is a significant barrier for a content management system.<\/p>\n
The first workaround seemed to solve the problem, except that the uploaded files were owned by Apache (the webserver in the LAMP stack).<\/p>\n
Unfortunately this took us to another permissions-based problem which stopped the owner (system user) modifying those files – even through ftp.<\/p>\n
If you think about it for a minute, it’s an interesting problem – where a vanilla software installation granted the higher-level directories one set of permissions, while the lower-level directories were granted different (and functionality-limiting) permissions.<\/p>\n
Anyway.<\/p>\n
The first attempt to fix the problem was to deploy suEXEC<\/a> on the server (VM). Unfortunately suEXEC didn’t get us all the way out of the problem, so we needed to look for another solution.<\/p>\n The second attempt to make the problem go away was to use fastCGI<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yesterday afternoon Manuel, our brilliant technical resource, deployed fastCGI on the VM we have been using as a test.<\/p>\n I used the standard WordPress admin control panel to upload an image in to a test post and successfully published that.<\/p>\n Then created another test post, uploaded the image in to that and successfully published it.<\/p>\n Then I went back to both published posts and using the standard WordPress screen, I modified the second image and republished the post.<\/p>\n All of these tests worked.<\/p>\n Manuel’s next job is to add the deployment of fastCGI in to the VM creation template.<\/p>\n This will enable the datacentre to deploy a fully-functional LAMP-stack VM for a customer within a matter of seconds.<\/p>\n Well done Manuel!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During a phase of system testing on server c1, in the new datacentre, an interesting problem was discovered. Using WordPress as the template (so the results could be applied to Drupal installations – and any other of those .php-related content management systems), we discovered that permissions on high-level directories were \u2026 Continue reading