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Or, just because the vendor wants you to do something stupid, that doesn't make it the right thing to do.

As some of you may have noticed, comments for the site have been dead for a few days. This was due to some issues with the server it runs on, and a rather silly thing that Six Apart wants you to do with Movable Type.

The server issues were that a bunch of directories on the server, (including some of mine, which was rather embarrassing, and my only explanation is that I forgot they had been set that way. It was still stupid.), were set to be world - writable, aka 777 permissions. That combined with some PHP issues allowed a bunch of haxx0r kiddies to start running rogue IRC servers, etc. The folks at digital.forest fixed the permissions issues right away, but then Movable Type started acting up.

So I finally bite the bullet and spend the c-note to get the uber version of MT. What does support tell me? "Oh, the db directories have to be world writable, or you have to use cgiwrap/suexec, or MT won't work." This strikes me as nonsense, so we go back and forth a bit, and they insist on this. Six Apart should be very glad that I knew their support people weren't thinking clearly, because had I not used MT on servers i DO own, then I would have thought this was the answer, and moved over to WordPress.

Luckily, I not only knew they were wrong, but about 5 minutes of work showed me the answer: The group on the directories MT needs to be able to write to has to be set to the group Apache runs under. Once I did that, and set the folder/file permissions correctly, well, now I can post, and now you can comment, both of which may not be good to a lot of people. But Six Apart support should have already known this, and it should have been one of the first options, even though it looked like that might not work.

I especially want to thank the support staff at d.f., including Matt and Nik, both of whom sat on the phone across the weekend, and much of this week to help me get the permissions set correctly, (Yes, that's right. On the phone...on the weekend. Live, competent, professional tech support. One call, very little to no waiting. Another reason I recommend digital.forest), without whom, I'd have had a much harder job of moving to a different setup. Good job folks!

Technorati Tags: Apache, Heterogeneous Networks, Mac OS X, Movable Type, Tech Support, Technology

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