I'm having all kinds of permissions issues causing some of the administrator functions to not work. The Joomla backend is saying every single folder is unwriteable, yet I've set the chmod settings to 755 as indicated in all the guides.

Here is a list of permissions for the root directory.. I'm really at a loss..

total 666188
drwxr-xr-x 10 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 administrator
drwxr-xr-x  2 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 bin
drwxr-xr-x  3 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 cache
drwxr-xr-x  3 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 cgi-bin
drwxr-xr-x  2 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 cli
drwxr-xr-x 18 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 components
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin      2984 Aug 19 10:20 configuration.php
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin         0 Aug 13 18:30 favicon.gif
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin         0 Aug 13 18:30 favicon.ico
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin      2859 Aug 13 18:30 htaccess.txt
drwxr-xr-x  5 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 images
drwxr-xr-x  2 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 includes
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin      1013 Aug 13 18:30 index.php
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin      1905 Aug 13 18:30 joomla.xml
drwxr-xr-x  4 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 language
drwxr-xr-x  4 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 layouts
drwxr-xr-x 13 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 libraries
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin     17816 Aug 13 18:30 LICENSE.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin    154499 Aug 13 18:30 loader-wizard.php
drwxr-xr-x  2 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 logs
drwxr-xr-x 20 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 media
drwxr-xr-x 45 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 modules
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin         0 Aug 19 10:33 perms.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin        68 Aug 13 18:30 phpinfo.php
drwxr-xr-x 15 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 plugins
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin      4310 Aug 13 18:30 README.txt
drwxr-xr-x  2 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 rets
drwxr-xr-x  3 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 retsmd
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin       865 Aug 13 18:30 robots.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin       882 Aug 13 18:30 robots.txt.dist
drwxr-xr-x  6 austin austin      4096 Aug 13 18:30 templates
drwxr-xr-x  2 austin austin      4096 Aug 18 13:17 tmp
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin       407 Aug 13 18:30 weather-1.php
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin       909 Aug 13 18:30 weather.php
-rw-r--r--  1 austin austin      1609 Aug 13 18:30 web.config.txt

Here is the perms guide from Joomla: http://docs.joomla.org/Security_Checkli ... ermissions

Also, I followed the Linode guide on setting up the webserver: https://www.linode.com/docs/websites/hosting-a-website

Just a guess, but if the owner is 'justin', and only the owner has permissions to write to those files, then your Apache process can't write to those files unless it's running as user 'justin' instead of the normal Apache user.

The link you provided for Joomla permissions states that "With these permissions set, you will need to use FTP to update your Joomla installation. Not all modules support this. Remove modules which do not support FTP upgrades." Are you trying to update via FTP?

It turns out the issue was because my apache instance is run under the user www-data, but all the files were owned by "austin". Solved via chown.

Has anyone setup suEXEC after following the web hosting linode guide? I can't seem to get it working. It is installed and activated, but still get errors if I have the files owned by my local user account "austin".

Edit.. maybe SuEXEC isn't the answer. I simply have 1 user that has all websites hosted under it. Is it possible to just tell apache to be okay running scripts and editing files under this user? I looked at my /etc/apache2/envars file and noticed the following:

# Since there is no sane way to get the parsed apache2 config in scripts, some
# settings are defined via environment variables and then used in apache2ctl,
# /etc/init.d/apache2, /etc/logrotate.d/apache2, etc.
export APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data
export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=www-data

Would it be possible to just put my username in the www-data group and forget suEXEC all together? (edit 3, just tried this, didnt work)

Hello,

I think you mean suPHP not suEXEC. suEXEC is suPHP's older brother for CGI programs. There are many guides for installing suPHP, one I found that you might find useful is http://www.howtoforge.com/apache2_suphp_php4_php5.