This has to do with
media uploading in Wordpress.
Every time WP creates a folder for new uploads (it organizes uploads by year and month: yyyy/mm), it creates it with the "apache:apache' user and group, with full access to all (777 or drwxrwxrwx).
However, after that, WP cannot create a folder within that folder (e.g.: mkdir 2011 succeeds, but mkdir 2011/01 fails). Also, uploads cannot be moved into these newly created folders even though the permissions are 777 (rwxrwxrwx).
Once a month, I have to chown the newly created folders to be the same as user:group as the rest of the files. Once I do that, uploading works fine (which doesn't make sense to me The really frustrating part is that this problem doesn't exist in other WP installs on other domains on the same server.
* I wasn't sure if this should be here or on serverfault.
Edit: The containing directory /.../httpdocs/blog/wp-content/uploads has the correct ownership
drwxrwxrwx 5 myuser psaserv 4096 Jun 3 18:38 uploads
This is a Plesk/CentOS environment hosted by
Media Temple (dv).
I've written the following test script to simulate the problem
<pre><?php
$d = "d" . mt_rand(100, 500);
var_dump(
get_current_user(),
$d,
mkdir($d),
chmod($d, 0777),
mkdir("$d/$d"),
chmod("$d/$d", 0777),
fileowner($d),
getmyuid()
);
The script always creates the first directory mkdir($d) successfully. On domain A, where the WP problem is, it cannot create the nested directory mkdir("$d/$d"). However, on domain B, both directories are successfully created.
I am running each script at /var/www/vhosts/domainA/httpdocs/tmp/t.php and /var/www/vhosts/domainB/httpdocs/tmp/t.php respectively I checked the permissions on tmp, httpdocs, and domain[AB] and they are the same for each path. The only thing that differs is the user.
