[Zope] Ownership & permissions of var for Zope on port 80: Definitive answer?

[Ian Beatty]

Greetings.

I'm going crazy trying to figure this one out.

What I want is pretty simple: to have Zope (2.6.1, python 2.1.3)  run on
port 80 on a Red Hat 8 system. That's got to be pretty common, right? I've
got a startup script which runs as root, and launches Zope with the -u flag
to change the process owner to a user named 'zope'.

Problem is, I can't figure out how to set the ownership and permissions of
the var directory to get everything to work properly. I've tried setting
everything as instructed in doc/SETUID.txt, but that doesn't work for me.
I've also found conflicting information in the archives of this list and in
other Zope docs.

Basically, I get one of two problems:

1) If I set the owner of var and its contents to root, Zope launches just
fine, but if I try to pack the database through the ZMI, I get
permission-denied errors. My Plone site managers also start getting weird
permission-denied errors after a while, too.

2) If I set the owner of var and its contents to the Zope user 'zope', Zope
silently fails on launch. If, however, I let Zope launch with root owning
var and then, after it's running, change the owner to 'zope', everything
works just fine. Until the next time Zope needs to restart, when it silently
fails. Ugh.

I've tried setting var's owner to root and group to zope (the group that the
zope user belongs to), with g+w permission to var and its contents, but then
I still get permission-denied and 'Operation not permitted' errors when
packing the ODB.

I've done chmod o+t and chmod a+s, neither of which seem to have helped
much. (I don't really understand what they do, but one was indicated in
SETUID.txt, and the other somewhere else on zope.org or someplace like
that.)

Please, there's *got* to be a definitive answer on how to set up a linux
system for running Zope on privileged ports. Can someone post or point me to
it?

Thanks,

..Ian Beatty

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  Dr. Ian Beatty                       webmaster at physics.umass.edu
  Webmaster, Department of Physics     voice: 413.545.9483
  Univ. of Massachusetts               fax:   413.545.4884
  Amherst, MA 01003-4525 USA           http://www.physics.umass.edu/
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