Cron jobs (Non FQ)

[johnfl68]

Hello:

Hopefully someone can help me understand best way to do this.

Here at FQ, I edit the Crontab (presumably as my user account) and the jobs (Perl Scripts) run fine.

I'm trying to do the same on a Ubuntu 13.10 Server, and having issues, and I think it is multiple things; root, users, group access, or combinations.

Scripts are in /home/johnb/scripts/ (755)
Website is in /var/www/ (765)
Cron jobs are run as johnb

Some files were not being written to /var/www/
I changed cronjobs to run as root - then files that weren't written are, but files that were already wrote, would not.

There were a mix of owners in /var/www/ so I changed them all back to root owner, several places on the web said this is best.

Also as suggested, I added a usergroup webmasters, and added user johnb to that, and added that group to /var/www/ which I think is a step in the right direction, but I am still having issues with scripts run as johnb not writing files to /var/www/

It's so much simple when the same user owns everything, but I understand the security issues.

So am I missing something here?

Does my user cron not have the same permissions as me?
If I am a member of the webmasters user group with write permissions, why can't my cron perl scripts write files to /var/www/ ?

I'm sure it's something simple, and I am just missing or misunderstand some little item.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, it would be appreciated.

Thanks.

John

[oheso]

It sounds like you're on the right track. Here are some things to check:

- Are you checking in the filesystem that the files are not present, or just looking for them via the web? If they are present in the filesystem but not being served, try changing the owner to apache.

- You say you added group webmasters to /var/www, but don't say what permissions you gave it. Does it have write permissions?

- When you added the above permissions, did you do it recursively for all subdirectories?

That's all that occurs to me off the top of my head. If you find the files are not being written (rather than just not appearing via the web), you should probably add logging to your cron job to see what the error message is.

My preference for files written to the /var/www directory would be to chown apache:apache after writing. This should help you if the files are being written but not appearing via the web. (Also check the permissions on the files, which should be 755 or similar.)