I want to install sphinx search on a web-hosting server. I'm on a Linux VPS with hostgator, but I never actually installed anything on a remote server so this will be a first time for me.

If there's anyone here who installed sphinx it's really help me

I had some problems when using sphinx on my PC with the permissions and the MySQL files, eventually I got it working on my PC. Anyway, I'd me really grateful if anyone can help me with some questions

1. Do i need root access to install sphinx? I have root access to the server but I'd connect to it as a normal user since doing stuff as root is always less secure.

2. can anyone tell me by what user I need to execute the indexer and the search daemon? Should I use root access in order to this? when I did it as a normal user on my PC it gave me some trouble with the PID file and the log files.

3. last time I executed the search deamon I executed it as a normal user and it gave me some trouble, I created the folder /var/log/ for log files and did chmod 777 on it, but still when I executed the search daemon it created the PID file "searchd.pid" file but with no permissions for some reason, any idea why?

Thanx in advance. fiftyeight