Hosting company stopped allowed CHMOD 777

Furton · 6 Sep 2008 at 15:33

I set up a site a few months ago and had everything working correctly until last week when the forums stopped working (phpBB 3.x). Turns out the chmod settings had been re-set, I changed them back and a few hours later they were re-set again. I thought the hosting company must have moved the server but after sending off an e-mail to their tech support I got this.

Hello,

The permissions on the server seems to be fine. Please note that we can't allow 777 permissions on the server due to security reasons. We have some scripts running on the server which checks for 777 permissions and change it to 755.

Since apache is running as cgi on the server, 755 should work. Please check with your programmer also regrading this.

Has anyone come across such a stupid idea before? Is there a way around this or should I move host.

Kemik · 6 Sep 2008 at 15:47

Why do you need 777 instead of 755?

Furton · 6 Sep 2008 at 15:49

Because phpBB require's it, although after a few e-mails with tech support they've added a handler entry in .htaccess file which seems to have fixed the issue.

Cuchulain · 6 Sep 2008 at 15:52

Furton said:
I set up a site a few months ago and had everything working correctly until last week when the forums stopped working (phpBB 3.x). Turns out the chmod settings had been re-set, I changed them back and a few hours later they were re-set again. I thought the hosting company must have moved the server but after sending off an e-mail to their tech support I got this.

Has anyone come across such a stupid idea before? Is there a way around this or should I move host.

It's a good idea if they use suexec, clearly they don't. I'd move host as they appear to be a bunch of amateurs.

Adz · 6 Sep 2008 at 17:01

It sounds like they *do* have PHP running under suexec/suphp and therefore you shouldn't need files to be group/world writeable as PHP will run under your main site user on most shared hosting platforms.

It is true that (by default) suexec/suphp won't run PHP files which are world or group writeable so that's fairly normal.

However if you can't write to the files without the 777 permissions then there is most likely a misconfiguration on your host's server which they should correct.