Secure admin & Dir permiss. 755?

[akyana]

Background:

 

I am a newbie who has done enough reading to be dangerous. I am on a very steep learnig curve and obviously don't know a whole lot. We're a small company (3 people) and right now, can't afford to pay an outside consultant.

 

After realising that the guy that previously had done our OSC stuff left no real footprint of what he had done to our install of OSC I decided to set up a test site on our server so I can start going through it, checking everything and then installing useful contributions, whilst leaving our live site undisturbed. The idea is I then use the updated test install to replace the original site, with a new mysql5 database.

 

I set up a new database with our host, and a new osc test sub directory, restored the old database to the test one and copied the older installed osc files to the new directory. I was getting the 1054 error, and read lots. Then realised the new test install was on a server with mysql5 and the old one was on an iteration of mysql 4. Changed the bits of code needed and now the test site is working (thanks for all those previous answers on the forum that helped me with that one)

 

 

What I've found is that if I have the admin section on the secure part of the site, I get an error message saying certain directories (images, graphs(banners) and backups) are not writeable. When admin is secure, this error message only goes away if I change the directory permissions to 777, which I understand is not great. When the admin section is not behind the secure server, I can change permissions back to 755 and not get that "not writeable" error message.

 

Is there a way of having admin secure and the dir permissions at 755? What is best practice? I can't find anything on google or the forums relating to this specifically and, with my lack of knowledge, I'm unsure if this is caused through OSC or my host.

 

Thanks in advance.

Andrea

[akyana]

Background:

 

I am a newbie who has done enough reading to be dangerous. I am on a very steep learnig curve and obviously don't know a whole lot. We're a small company (3 people) and right now, can't afford to pay an outside consultant.

 

After realising that the guy that previously had done our OSC stuff left no real footprint of what he had done to our install of OSC I decided to set up a test site on our server so I can start going through it, checking everything and then installing useful contributions, whilst leaving our live site undisturbed. The idea is I then use the updated test install to replace the original site, with a new mysql5 database.

 

I set up a new database with our host, and a new osc test sub directory, restored the old database to the test one and copied the older installed osc files to the new directory. I was getting the 1054 error, and read lots. Then realised the new test install was on a server with mysql5 and the old one was on an iteration of mysql 4. Changed the bits of code needed and now the test site is working (thanks for all those previous answers on the forum that helped me with that one)

 

 

What I've found is that if I have the admin section on the secure part of the site, I get an error message saying certain directories (images, graphs(banners) and backups) are not writeable. When admin is secure, this error message only goes away if I change the directory permissions to 777, which I understand is not great. When the admin section is not behind the secure server, I can change permissions back to 755 and not get that "not writeable" error message.

 

Is there a way of having admin secure and the dir permissions at 755? What is best practice? I can't find anything on google or the forums relating to this specifically and, with my lack of knowledge, I'm unsure if this is caused through OSC or my host.

 

Thanks in advance.

Andrea

 

Scratch that help request. I may have just found the answer here: http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?sho...276379&st=0

 

Now to test.

 

Thats what I get for searching the forums late at night ;)

 

Sorry.

 

Andrea