Drew Burden

Is that subject line random enough? I actually do need pants. I have a strange feeling that business is about to pick up and I need to dress professionale. The letter E at the end there is intentional.

I’ve been up all night playing with my webserver. As in MY webserver. At the office building. And I have learned today… that mod_suPHP is a BITCH. From HELL. Not only does Simple Machines Forum not function well without it, I managed to completely fuck up the file and folder permissions on one of my sites today by trying to satisfy suPHP’s Nazi-like requirements… which are a lot like safe mode and I hate it. You have to own the script file and no one else can be able to write to it. Okay… so blanket solution. Change to the root folder of the site and execute chmod -R 644 *. WRONG. I conveniently forgot folders have to have the execute attribute set to be able to list anything in them or directly request a world-readable file in them. (Through some sort of process, you can also conclude that file permissions on a UNIX-based system are also bitches who live next door to suPHP in hell. Windows file permissions, however, have the penthouse in the seventh circle of hell along with Lucifer himself.) So I had to go through all the subfolders and set their permissions to 755. It would have been a lot easier if there were some sort of commandline option to only apply the change to directories. There’s not, so please, let’s frustrate Drew more. After mistyping the chmod command about 383738452475369 times, and that value is slightly exaggerated, all the folders were back to normal and something actually showed up when I visited the site.

It’s safe to say that today has already been quite interesting. I have plenty of work to do and I haven’t had a bit of sleep. Lovely!