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

[Dieter Maurer]

Ian Beatty wrote at 2003-9-17 09:49 -0400:
 > ...
 > 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'.
 > ...
 > 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.

This is to be expected.

 > 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.

This looks like the bug, Chris fixed for Zope 2.7:

  Zope opens its log file at a time when it still runs as root.
  Later, when it has switched to the new user, it is no longer
  able to write logs.

Chris' fix: delay opening the log file until the user is switched.
 > 
 > 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.

Probably, your "umask" does not give write access for the group.
"umask" is used for all files which are newly created.


Dieter