OK, I have tried everything. I cannot delete, move, rename or do much of ANYTHING (including removing CHMOD 550) to the installed files (GF 1.17) on my hosted Unix server. This is unacceptable.

Please, someone, advise how to take care of this very irritating problem. This blights the GF installation and makes us less interested in using it long-term.

Mmm it's not the installers fault, that just how web servers work...if you run the installer from your browser it will set the file ownership as the web server user/group....install from telnet or ssh and you may find you don't have that problem.

The installer can't change file ownerships unless being run as root.

You'll have to get your host to chown/chgrp the files back.

Thanks, Paul. I guess I now see the difference in the installation format vis-a-vis dir-by-dir manual installation, but it's still a hassle that seems -- well, archaic -- given the ease of installing and uninstalling other competitive products.

While I am at it, I would note my objection to the installation routine generally -- I would prefer unbundling files and subdirs on MY machine and using FTP to transfer -- why upload a huge DAT file every time you suspect file corruption? I often simply run another transfer on suspect files in a server subdir -- it's easy and foolproof, if one ahs kept changes up to date (by reverse transfer if server editing took place).

I am only a poor lay user, and dealing with my hosting service is often difficult -- so having to go to the web host for file deletion or transfer is not an appealing option.

>>
but it's still a hassle that seems -- well, archaic -- given the ease of installing and uninstalling other competitive products.
<<

It doesn't seem to do this on all servers...I can normally edit the files so I'm not sure what happened to your installation :(

>>
While I am at it, I would note my objection to the installation routine generally -- I would prefer unbundling files and subdirs on MY machine and using FTP to transfer -- why upload a huge DAT file every time you suspect file corruption?
<<

You should upload the small tar file and untar it on your server...you don't want to be uploading a 10MB file everytime...I can see how annoying that would be....or you can rename install.dat to install.tar and open it with winzip.

Hi Paul,

I have the same problem than cajun100. Can you please explain a bit how to install Gforum throw telnet? How do we select the upgrade option and put the admin path...?

Thank you!

François

You just need to login to your telnet account and change directory to your GForum admin directory and type:

perl install.cgi

Then follow the instructions that appear...it's really simple (probably not as complicated as you are thinking).

Hi,

As Paul explained, due to CGI scripts generally running as another user, this does cause problems editing the files. However, Gossamer Forum includes Fileman, and since it runs on the server as the same user, it will have access to modify/delete files. You can also use Fileman's "Command" mode to directly input shell commands as the web user.

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com

Very much appreciate the hints and information, people. I will try to use the suggestions.