Mission Permission

September 6, 2014 – I spent a few hours trying to get my two websites back on my Beaglebone Black and succeeded (as per my previous post). But I still could not see (parse) the files that were already on my ‘html’ folder on which my my sda1 (micro sd card) was mounted.

I checked a few websites looking for answers. The problem was obviously one of getting/setting the right permissions, for the folder or Apache or something! I found the right answer after trying a suggestion on the following web page:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10873295/error-message-forbidden-you-dont-have-permission-to-access-on-this-server

The page said the following:

Forbidden You don’t have permission to access / on this server is actually the default configuration for an apache directory in httpd.conf.

#
# Each directory to which Apache has access can be configured with respect
# to which services and features are allowed and/or disabled in that
# directory (and its subdirectories). 
#
# First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of 
# features.  
#
<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all          # the cause of permission denied
</Directory>

Simply changing Deny from all to Allow from all should solve the permission problem.

Terminal window showing file ownership

I tried it and it worked! I was able to view an index.html file inside the ‘html’ folder! That all happened on the 3rd of September 2014.  I figured that all was well with my Beaglebone Black and I could start moving my sites back to the mounted  external drive. Yesterday, September 5, 2014 I fired up my Filezilla ftp program and tried to upload files to html folder. I was upset to find out that I don’t have permission to add files to that folder. Doing a quick ‘ls -la’ showed that the ‘html’ folder was own and grouped to ‘root’.  I did not remember making that a root folder.

So I tried a little experiment. I unmounted the external micro sd  — with a quick  ‘sudo umount  /dev/sda’. I then created another folder called ‘htm’ and mounted the drive to it.  I then  ‘ls -la’ again and found that my ‘html’ folder was now owned by me and that the ‘htm’ folder was now owned by root even though it had previously been owned by me. It seems (as I suspected) that mounting a drive to a folder automatically makes that folder’s ownership and group change to root. Problem is, that unless one is root one can not add, delete or use that folder. Which makes the whole enterprise Useless!  This is one of my pet peeves about Linux.  It works so hard a being secure that it makes itself not useful. At times like these I just want to slack those who would defend this stupidity, this having to search even more hours, try even more things just to do what works perfectly OK on Windows!! I have spent over 6 hours in research in trying to get a stupid micro sd card to work, to mount and I still can’t use it!!

I have researched this issue and have tried a few of their remedies, but none of them work. Even as root I can not change the permissions on the mounted sd card – sda1. I wish there was someone to sue for all this waste of time. If I had the money, I’d sue Apache, and Linus for making life harder than it needs to be and for not having clear cut instructions on how to exactly fix things.