Apache and umask 002
I ran into a problem with Apache on Centos 6. For some time, I was the only person who had access to this particular machine so permissions were not a problem. However, now that somebody else is taking care of the website hosted there, they had troubles editing files that were uploaded via website and owned by apache. So I added the user to the apache group and put this line:
umask 002
into file:
/etc/sysconfig/httpd
That way, any file created by apache user was by default writable by the apache group so the given user would be able to work with those files. When I tried it out, however, it didn’t work, the user was not able to modify those files, to my frustration. Now, I was left with two options, either pull my hair off, or modify the httpd init script, neither of them much to my liking. Eventually, I found out that the solution was pretty easy – the PHP upload script was explicitly setting the permissions to 644 so members of apache group were not able to modify the file. When I modified the application and its chmod command, everything worked like a charm.
Update 17. 4. 2017
I came to face the same situation with nginx on Centos 7. The issue was basically the same, only the file where umask directive had to be placed to was different:
/lib/systemd/php-fpm.service
and umask had to be placed into the [Service] section:
[Service] #other stuff here UMask=0002
I got a machine on which I wanted to try Centos 7 and KVM virtualization. As usual, I had to search for how to do a network bridge as it’s been quite long since I did it last time (on Centos 6). So these are the basic steps. First, dont’t forget to install bridge-utils while installing the KVM-related packages:
Although jabber is my preferred IM protocol, sometimes I have to communicate with people who, for some reason, only use Skype. On Debian, that can be quite a problem, supposing you are not particularly keen on weed infestation of your system. One way to get Skype was to start a virtual machine with another operating system. That is a rather resource hungry solution for one application only, however. Last week I found a satisfactory solution – run Skype in a docker container. It was a double win as I finally discovered something to use docker for 🙂
Yii framework has a really nice CRUD generator that can speed up building back-end applications, which tend to be rather similar and therefore repetitive. If you prepare reasonable taxonomy of the underlying database tables, it also manages the page headers pretty well. If your table is called album, for instance, it will generate a page for editing albums with a header “Edit Album #1”, an index page called “List Albums” or the management page called “Manage Albums”. As you can see, it will even handle the plural forms. However, this works fine for English projects, but may not be desirable for other languages.