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#10168 Joomla Core update ftp fails

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
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Admin Tools version
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Latest post by user8363 on Wednesday, 28 December 2011 11:30 CST

Thursday, 22 December 2011 04:43 CST

user8363
Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Have I searched the forum before posting? Yes (found relevant question and tried to follow your advice)
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? Yes (all pages of admin tools)
Joomla! version: (1.5.21)
PHP version: (5)
MySQL version: (5.0)
Host: (rackspace, with cloud VPS server, CentOS5.5, with WHM/cPanel)
Admin Tools version: (2.1.14)


Description of my issue:
When I run Joomla Update in Admin Tools (I have Pro) with the FTP option, some files (many!) fail to be update because of permission issues. I run the update, fix the relevant file, but next time another file is the problem.

I tried to follow your advice from the thread: https://www.akeebabackup.com/support/forum/admin-tools-support/update-problem-could-not-open-index2php-for-writing/54930.html#p54930, but when I change all files and folders to 777, I immediately get an error (500?)
When I change configuration.php, and administrator and administrator/index.php back to 755 I can work again.

But when I now run the update I get a message saying "Ajax loading error. Internal server error".

Interestingly enough, I first updated the Admin Tools Core, and this worked fine (no errors).

I have after that bought Admin Tools Pro, and continued to try to update Joomla, but no result.

thanks for help, I love you products!

Regards

Per-Olof

Thursday, 22 December 2011 05:25 CST

nicholas
Hello Per-Olof,

You seem to have mixed up the ownerships of your files and directories. Most likely your Joomla! core files are owned by the user under which your web server runs and not by the user of your FTP login. This means that you can't use the FTP method to upgrade your site. Even worse, you might have a "mixed" state, with some files owned by one user and some files owned by another user.

Fixing that yourself is very complicated and could take forever, or even not work at all. I'd recommend asking your host to do three extremely simple things:
- Change the ownership of all files and directories of your site to your FTP user
- Change the permissions of the files to 0644
- Change the permissions of the directories to 0755
It's literally just three commands to type for your host. They can do that because they have root access to the server, something that you don't have. After they do that, you should be able to use the FTP mode to upgrade your site.

Note: You might have to give your cache, administrator/cache, log and tmp directories 0777 permissions. If you do that, please upload a .htaccess file in each of those directories with the following contents:
order deny, allow
deny from all
and give those .htaccess files 0644 permissions in order to secure those directories.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 22 December 2011 09:55 CST

user8363
Thanks for your speedy reply; I have in the mean time been out shopping christmas presents, but I will follow your recommendations.

Per-Olof

Thursday, 22 December 2011 10:02 CST

user8363
A follow up question, so I get things strait.

You refer to web server user, and FTP user.

The computer in questions is a VPS, with a root user, and several accounts (users) with each their own homes (with public_html folders where the Joomla installation resides).

The site in question is www.eunike.se

The user I log in as to set up Joomla is 'eunike', and I can FTP from the outside with 'eunike'.

I assume that when you say FTP user you mean the account Eunike, and when you say web server user you mean root (of the Centos5.5 server)?

The server has WHM/cPanel, and I have used cPanel to migrate the accounts from an old server (an another hosting company railshosting.com) to the new server.

Per-Olof

Friday, 23 December 2011 02:25 CST

nicholas
Hi!

There is some overlapping terminology here.

What you call a "VPS root user" is actually the VPS "master" account, who "owns" the accounting of all sub-accounts. It has nothing to do with users, ownership and permissions. What I (and everyone else) call root user is an actual user account with a username of root and a user and group ID of 0. He is the God of the server and can do anything and everything. As you understand, the password to this account is coveted and kept only within the strict confines of your host's staff.

What we need your host to do is, indeed, to have all files and folders owned by the "eunike" user (the one you use for FTP).

The actual technology of the web server (the physical machine with the operating system and software) is completely irrelevant to what we need. As long as it is a LInux-based Operating System (it is!) everything I said above still holds true :)

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Monday, 26 December 2011 14:57 CST

muddauber
I have a similar problem, but I have reviewed all my directories and files that they all appear to be owned by my account ID, not by "nobody". I have had this type of problem on another server, but this situation does not show any ownership problems.

Monday, 26 December 2011 15:02 CST

nicholas
Please note that the writable status of each folder and file is determined by two things: ownership and permissions. If you stick to either of them and forget the other one, you are not going to understand if your files/folders are writable or not. Given that in your other thread you state that you get an upload error, you will have to check the permissions of those files/directories as well.

And since your issue is completely irrelevant to this thread, please do not post a reply here, but please DO post a reply to your own thread. Frankly, I can not help you if you spread pieces of information about your issue in several threads. Do keep in mind that I usually receive 20-80 new threads or thread replies every single day and I am a human, i.e. I can not remember everything everybody has stated in each and every thread he's ever created or replied to in every category on this forum :)

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 28 December 2011 11:30 CST

user8363
Hi Nicholas,

I just wanted to thank you for your excellent service, and knowledgeable answers.

Since I have just moved to a VPS-server I had to log in myself and run the commands, but here I got help from friend who knows Linux.

For the sake of other readers I post the commands here:

First I changed the ownership of files and folders,
chown -R 'user':'group' public_html

in my case eunike:eunike (since the group name in that account was eunike too).

I changed the folders cache, tmp and logs to be owned by nobody with 777 rights (using the graphical tool you recommended). And added a .htaccess according to your instructions.

I also had to give 'other' rights to execute on all files and folders. Otherwise I could not install the new components, and upgrade to the latest Joomla.
chmod o+rx public_html

After installing the latest versions of your tools and upgrading Joomla I reverted all files to 644.

Again thank you for you help!

Per-Olof




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