Unable to write

Anon

Hi,

I've written a simple page-hit counter for my site.

I open a file, read the value, then overwrite the value with value+1. Then I close the file.

However, although it runs ok when I try it on my Win2000/IIS setup, it fails on my live site - my ISP uses Linux.

Anyone know of any reasons for this. Is it usual for ISP's to restrict access to writing to files, even from PHP scripts on the server? Is this what the .htaccess file is for, and if so what do I need to do to enable writing?

TIA.

Anon

Check that the file has read and write access for the user the webserver runs as. For example, if the webserv runs as apache, apache must be able to read and write the counter file.

Since your server probably hosts many sites, you probably don't want to make your file world writeable. You migh could try making the file owned by your username and the apache groupname and then chmod it to give read and write access to owner and group. For example:

chown jsmith:apache /home/jsmith/html/counterfile.txt

chmod 660 /home/jsmith/html/counterfile.txt

Lacey

Anon

Thanks for the info. The live site is indeed running under apache, so the details you provided would seem to be the way to go.

How do I get these commands run? Sorry, I have almost zero knowledge of Linux/Unix yet (hoping to soon - I'm a long time OS/2 and Windows user). Obviously I can't get to the command line since my only interaction with the site is via FTP. Can these commands go in .htaccess or some other file.

Really appreciate the help,
Jean-Yves

Anon

Since you don't have shell access, you'll have to find an FTP client that will do the chmod command. I know that WS_FTP does. (I use the free version, it works fine.)

I don't know of any FTP clients that will do the chown command, which means that in order to let apache write to the file, you'll have to let anybody write to the file.

Instead of a command line, in WS_FTP, right-click on your file and select the "chmod (UNIX)" option. Check off read, write, and execute for each of the three groups ("user" "group" and "other"). Please note that this is pretty insecure, and you DON'T want to do this on a production server or anything more important than a personal web page counter.

Lacey

jean-yves

That's great, thanks for all the info.

It's just a web counter so security is not much of an issue. I'm pretty sure that I get fairly minimal traffic anyway so if I suddenly get hits in the millions then I'll know that something's wrong!