Joomla Upgrade - Unwriteable Directories

I have at least 10 domains on DH running Joomla. After I performed the most recent upgrade (using 1-click), I discovered a number of my directories are no longer writeable, as Joomla expects. So while everything currently seems to be running fine, I cannot upgrade any components/modules/mambots or do any new installs of other extensions.

I checked at least 5 of my domains, all under different FTP users and found this situation to be true for all of them. AND, the number of unwriteable directories differs from domain to domain. I also inspected domains where I am NOT running Joomla and found no directory problems there. So I am currently suspecting the 1-click upgrade script is missing some essential code to properly set ownership after it has done its work.

I've logged a support ticket, but I am curious to know if anyone else has discovered this problem too.


Best Regards,

Martin

that sounds really unusual; I've been running "lots" of Joomla! sites on DH for uears now, and have installed and upgraded using the "one-click" method, the "manual" approach using the shell, and the "patch" process all along and have never experienced that.

It almost sounds as though the "upgrade" process didn't comlpete. IF you upgraded using "one-click", the DH script that does the "upgrade" probably would have to change permissions (unless they ran it as "root", and I doubt they did *that*!) in order to over-write the files you "own", and then restore the correct permissions when done. IF the process got interrupted (by a "crash", etc.) it might not have reset the permissions. I'm interested in hearing what response you get from support on this one.

If this happened, Joomla should still "run", though I think there *might* be a likelyhood of "subtle" issues brought about by the "mixing" of the files from two versions.

If DH support can't get it sorted for you, you might just "running the upgrade" again, (or, even better, doing it manually from the shell, and see if that fixes the problem.

--rlparker

Well, I have good news and bad news. I submitted another DH ticket and flagged it for call back. I quickly got a call from one of the guys and he confirmed my suspicion. It appears the upgrade script did make incorrect assignments of directory ownership -- but it only happened on my server (galaga). They're checking other servers and are looking into what might have caused the problem. He is having to correct it one directory at a time (ouch!).

The other side of this story is that the Joomla system still ran fine, I simply could not upgrade or install any modules, components, etc.

Incidentally, I looked at my .old directories for several domains and they also had the problem of mis-assigned directory ownership. However, when I looked back at one of my older upgrades (from 1.08 to 1.09), those directories were fine.

Thanks for the reply.

Best Regards,

Martin

Thanks for the update! Just our of curiosity, what user ended up "owning" the problematic directories?

--rlparker

I'm not really sure what the actual user name was. For example, one of my ftp ids usually shows ownership as:

ftpname (#####) /pg###### (####)

The entries I was seeing had no owner and no group. They looked like this:

(1000) / (1000)

I just created a new subdomain and then installed joomla with a new DB and new user. That installation went fine and all the directories seem to have the right ownership.

Perhaps it was just one of those unique hiccups because I did a bunch of upgrades sequentially. Who knows?

The good news is it all seems to be back now!

Best Regards,

Martin

Thanks for the up-date, and we all know that these puppies " hiccup" on occasion...

--rlparker

I had a similar problem with the Gallery software. I did the one-click install and after giving up waiting for it to install (I waited for way longer than 10 minutes) I went to bed. This morning I looked at it and the directories were created, but the first step in configuring the software is to create a login.txt file in the main gallery directory and I was not able to do that. I looked at the permissions and 'root' was the owner of all the directories for Gallery.

I sent a request to have support look at it. I'll keep you posted.

Brad