Unix/Web file ownership question...

[Paunchy]

Alright, here's the situation... I'm publishing a website to a Raq server. One of the pages in the site contains a form that uses a generic form mailer. Now I've set the permissions on the cgi-bin directory to 755, the permissions for the formmail script to 755, and yet when I try to submit the form, the Raq responds with this canned message:

Execution of (nobody) is not permitted for the following reason:
User not Privileged.

I'm pretty sure I've covered the basics, but is there something I didn't think of? Thanks in advance.

 

[notfred]

The webserver is running as nobody. That means that the user nobody will have to have write access to the file.

I'm assuming the files are owned by you, and not root or nobody. So, 755 - the first digit indicates the owner of the file: you. 7 is all permissions, so you can read, write, and execute the file. the next digit is for group. I'd guess that's a group with the same name as your user name, but may be something else. It is set to 5, meaning read and execute, but not write. The last digit is for everyone's access. It is also set to 5, which is read and execute. I'm assuming that "nobody" falls into the third category. Your choices are to set the file writable by everyone (777), or to keep it set at 755 and give ownership of the file to nobody.

 

[Paunchy]

Actually, the files are owned by "nobody" with the 755 permission set on them. Does the ownership have to be changed for the script in order to have it executed by the world? I was under the impression that if that as long as the group permission was set to 5, it doesn't matter who the file belongs to.

 

[notfred]

Is this the "matt's scripts" formmail script?
Do other CGI scripts work?

 

[Paunchy]

Yeah, Matt's Scripts... I checked a few of the other site directories hosted on this machine, and apparently any other site using cgi's has an owner other than "nobody" associated with the file. Guess I'll just have to ask the sys admin to create a valid user other than "nobody" to take ownership of the file. Thanks for your help though.

 

[notfred]

I did a little search based on your error message, and it seems to be RAQ specific, and I have no experience with those machines.