noob help with permissions

danhan79 · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 7

I know that you shouldn't run as root so I have setup another user for daily work.

But how are permissions supposed to be setup on applications so that a regular user has access to them? I.e. I have Tomcat installed and all the directories are rwxr-x-r-x (with owner:tomcat and group:tomcat)
As a regular user (i.e. danhan) I want to have write capabilities so I've been adding danhan to the group: tomcat and changing all the directories under tomcat to rwxrwxr-x.

But is this the 'right' way to do it?

Or should I login as a user tomcat? (And I'm not sure what to do with application-created users....like when I emerged tomcat, the app created the user tomcat...)

_loki_ · l33t Joined: 18 Dec 2003 Posts: 680 Location: in the shell

You shouldn't change the permissions of the folders, when you are in the right group that souldn't be necessary.. A line like this

danhan79 · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 7

_loki_ · l33t Joined: 18 Dec 2003 Posts: 680 Location: in the shell

if you need write support you have to set the "w"; so the clean solution would be to put your user in the specific group and add write support for the group on the folder, just like you did!

adaptr · Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 8:49 pm Post subject:

As tomcat is an application server framework, it is conceivable you might want to work on it with more than one user, in which case assigning a group to it and adding you ruser to the gruop would be the correct way of gaining access.
If, however, you are the only user who needs write access to the tomcat system, then just use root to perform those functions.

Note that, even though tomcat does setup itself to also be owned by a group named "tomcat" this is often more a convention than of any functional use, since it does need the proper permissions for the group for a member of that group to be able to administrate it; it doesn't work by default.

Whether or not changing the group permissions on the tomcat system directories is a good idea should be detailed in the documentation.

Some applications demand proper permissions on directories, be it for security or functionality - if tomcat does not, then feel free to use the scheme outlined above.
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danhan79 · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 7

Thanks all. It's a bit clearer now.