Forum OpenACS CMS: permission denied

1: permission denied

Posted by Philipp Strazny on 11/14/01 06:06 PM

In making my first steps w/ the CMS I'm running into a file permission problem.

I've created a folder "subfolder1", and it contains a file "myFirstPage". When I try to publish this file (checking "live" & hitting "submit" in the "publishing" tab), I get the following error:
can't create directory "/subfolder1": permission denied
while executing
"file mkdir [string range $path 0 [expr $index - 1]]"
(procedure "mkdirs" line 11)
invoked from within
...
I inserted
puts $errorlog "pageroot used for mkdir: [ns_info pageroot]"
into the publish::mkdirs function in publish-procs.tcl to make sure the correct directory is being accessed, and it is: /web/openacs/www

The pageroot directory is owned by nsadmin.web; I start nsd w/
exec /opt/nsadmin/bin/nsd -u nsadmin -g web $*
and nsadmin belongs to group web.
The problem persists even if I chmod the pageroot to 777!

Can anybody think of what else I could check?

2: Response to permission denied (response to 1)

Posted by David Walker on 11/14/01 06:11 PM

Just from your error description it looks to me like it's literally trying to create /subfolder1 instead of /web/openacs/www/subfolder1

3: Response to permission denied (response to 1)

Posted by Philipp Strazny on 11/14/01 06:43 PM

Thanks, David.
That makes sense. I assumed that all files & folders created in the CMS would automatically be added under a legal (i.e. accessible for nsadmin) folder, namely the pageroot (www).

So, I created the path /web/openacs/www/subfolder2 and moved myFirstPage in there, and publishing worked.

Of course, I could only do that because I happen to know legal paths on the server. Other users would not. I suppose I could hardcode this path somewhere in publish-procs.tcl or add it as a parameter in the global config file (openacs.tcl). Or is there another way to tie the CMS to a legal directory?

4: Response to permission denied (response to 1)

Posted by Dan Wickstrom on 11/15/01 07:23 PM

Your assumption that all folders and files created under cms should correspond to a valid file-system path is correct. The PageRoot parameter sets the location where content is published. If the PageRoot value doesn't start with a slash, then the PageRoot parameter is relative to [ns_info pageroot]. Currently something is broken with the way that opts(page_root) is initialized. I tried modifying publish::publish_revision so that root path is set to the value returned by publish::get_page_root, and the publishing process worked fine.

I'm pressed for time now, but I'll try and track it down this week.

5: Response to permission denied (response to 1)

Posted by Philipp Strazny on 11/15/01 10:10 PM

Thanks, Dan. The pageroot problem also has other side-effects: when I define a template that references an image, the CMS only recognizes the image as "existing" if the HTML tag includes a full path. The AOLServer, however, goes by pageroot (as it should) & thus would not find the image then.