couple of newbie anomalies !?!?

[muppet-boy]

hi

i've just reinstalled mandrake 8.2 prosuite ed. and come across the following..

1.real handy tool 'locate' isnt installed and i've no idea how i'd go about doing that.. is it an rpm? or...

2.i've been trying to get all my file permissions sorted under a normal user so that i can get reasonable access without having to login as superuser every 5 mins.. however.. i've just used chmod on /var/www/html so i can create some files there,
- problem - kde says i dont have permission to create files, but if i go to the command line and login as the same user, i have no problems ??? i have no idea whats going on

any help with my 2 problems would be great! i'm not the best at writing what i mean.. so if it doesnt make sense.. just complain and i'll have another go

thanks

nev

[SkyNet]

Hello muppet-boy,

I'm not an rpm wiz, but look on your Mandrake CD's for locate, also it may be included with some other package that you may not have choosen to install. If you do find it then something like rpm -Uvh packagename.rpm will install it.

Now for a complete listing of what rpm does see JimH ;D

As for the permissions. Once you create a user, most things should already be setup to allow that user to have control over installed applications. However if they user wanted to install an application then it would have to be in that users home directory. For installing applications anywhere else, that's root's job. If you wanted to edit system wide files, that's root's job as well. It's all about security.

If you wanted to let user X play with /var/www/html then that dir would need to be owned by that user, as well as the files within. Or you could add that user to the group that owns the files. Then you would need the permissions to look something like this: rw-rw---. It would have to be that way for the directory as well as the files. Another way would be to all other to access the files. In which case nothing needs to be done about adding groups etc. Only need to modify permissions to allow other to access the files. That would like like this: rw-rw-rw-. This later method though is pretty much like saying everyone, and their gandmother need to come play with my files.

[muppet-boy]

Or you could add that user to the group that owns the files. Then you would need the permissions to look something like this: rw-rw---. It would have to be that way for the directory as well as the files.

thanx for the reply. i found locate - its actually called slocate

i added my user to the apache group to give r/w to /var/www/html which worked fine... at the command line.. but not in the kde gui > which is where i came unstuck - coz i thought they should all obey the same rules.

[trommaster]

this is another possibitily for the web thing:
use user directorys.
in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf...

<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
#UserDir disable
UserDir public_html
</IfModule>
you want this section to look something like this... mine is an apache 2.0 config file, so it might looks slightly different.

under it, this should be commented out... uncomment it. (remove the #'s)
<Directory /home/*/public_html>
AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec
<Limit GET POST OPTIONS>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Limit>
<LimitExcept GET POST OPTIONS>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</LimitExcept>
</Directory>

at a terminal.
$cd /home
$chmod 711 <user>
$cd <user>
$mkdir public_html
$chmod 755 public_html

now put in an index.html file there and go
$chmod a+r index.html
--all files in here need to be world readable, that is something like -rw-rw-r--

restart apache
$su
<password>
#/sbin/service httpd restart

now going to http://localhost/~<user>/ should load up the page

Have fun!

[SkyNet]

Yes, KDE's gui should obey the permissions as well. Perhaps it just needed to be restarted?